Website accessible on http and https. Is it bad?

[CyrilWilson]

We noticed that our website is accessible on:

http://www.example.com and

https://www.example.com

Both the versions have page rank of 4.

Though on https version we have added canonical tag indicating http:// version as preferred.

Is this fine or we need to use 301 redirect and let the site be accessible only on http:// version??

[donford]

Yes 301 is my preferred way to deal with this.

If you can use

**if (isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']) && strtolower($_SERVER['HTTPS']) == 'on') {
echo ''. "\n";
}**

REF: http://www.seobook.com/archives/001714.shtml

It is a very common issue, https is needed for sensitive info, but Search Engines don't t need to access.

[gcdtechnologies]

Hi Cyril, a 301 redirect would be preferable to a canonical link in this case.

[matbennett]

Cyril - I honestly wouldn't worry about this. The vast majority of sites with https behave like this and it doesn't cause a problem.  Your canonical is extra protection against it.

[MoosaHemani]

Depends, If you have secure login system on your website then you cannot put 301 on https because in that case user might not be able to access the login area.

Adding canonical is fine and you can also restrict from crawling by adding it in to Robots.txt file.

[CyrilWilson]

Yes as we are an eCommerce site, we have login and cart pages as secure. So as per the responses received so far, we should not worry about it.

-The canonical element is already there for protection

• Adding no index or restricting through robots can be added precaution

Thanks everyone for the reply!