Https redirect

[elisainteractive]

Hi there,

a client of mine is asking me if Google would penalize to redirect from all the http urls to https (they want to change the security protocol).

I assume it is going to work as a classic 301, right? so they might lose some authority in they way, but I am not 100% sure. Can anyone confirm this? does anyone has a similar experience?

thanks a lot!

[perfectweb]

Switching to https by using a 301 redirect will probably cause a temporary dip in traffic, but this should only be temporary.

It would make sure that you use a "rel=canonical" tag on the pages just to be clear to Google that the HTTPS version is what you want users to see.

[Julich]

If the 301 redirection is correctly implemented (a 301 redirection for each single http page to the https page), this should be OK. From a theorical point of view, you may loss around ~10% of the linkjuice from existing backlinks. However, I personally never noticed a negative impact of my rankings on this kind of massive website redirection.

Here are a just few things I would recommend you pay attention to:

• Make 100% sure you correctly implement your 301 redirections.
• Once you've correctly implemented your 301 redirections, submit an XML sitemap of your old URLs (starting with standard http://) to ask Google to recrawl your old URLs and see that they have been 301-redirected to https://* URLs. This will make Google update its index more quickly.
• Also make sure your https website doesn't require resources (such as images, javascripts, css files) that are not served in https. If your HTTPS pages require resources served in HTTP, Internet Explorer will popup a warning message asking for the user if he wants to display resources which are not secured.

My two cents.

J.

[StalkerB]

Do all the pages need to be https or just some of them? I'm not a huge fan of working with all https sites, but appreciate sometimes it's necessary.

Some things you may want to look at - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/solving-duplicate-content-issues-with-http-and-https

As with any redirect you're losing some juice, but if it needs to be done it should just be the same as a normal redirect. This should be safe:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I never see many top sites using https exclusively, even paypal has it's http version in the SERPs (though redirects you to the https immediately) because nobody links to the https version. Well, not nobody, but you get what I mean, nobody immediately thinks to put that 's' in there so there's lots of links to the http version.

Both are fine to use though.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Michael,

What did you and the client end up deciding? Do you have any lessons learned or anything interesting to share? We'd love to hear it!