Does using non-https links (not pages) impact or penalise the website rankings?

[vtmoz]

Hi community,

We have couple of pages where we we have given non-https (http) hyperlinks by mistake. They will redirect to http links anyway. Does using these http links on page hurt any rankings?

Thansk

[effectdigital]

You won't be making the most of your SEO authority by firing it through redirects. A to B is always better than putting 301s in the middle of links. It's also bad UX because, you send the user to too many locations which is inefficient and a waste of their time.

I wouldn't expect something like this to make much difference overall, but if you were going to 'do it right' you would just fix it. It's also not good to have too many links pointing to 'insecure' addresses, even if they will later be intercepted. I would just go in and fix the problem.

In SEO, very few things make much difference at all (if there was one thing that made the most difference, everyone would just focus on that). Instead it's about pride, balance and stopping snowballs from forming before they start to roll. If you ignore this one, you'll also ignore all related issues and over time you could notice a performance hit (for poor link structure, lower site health, linking to insecure content, wasting user's time with redirects / bad UX).

Instead of sitting back and waiting for bad things to happen, nip it in the bud. It only takes five minutes and then your mind can be at rest