Best practices for handling https content?

[CodyWheeler]

Hi Mozzers - I'm having an issue with https content on my site that I need help with.

Basically we have some pages that are meant to be secured, cart pages, auth pages, etc, and then we have the rest of the site that isn't secured. I need those pages to load correctly and independently of one another so that we are using both protocols correctly.

Problem is - when a secure page is rendered the resources behind it (scripts, etc) won't load with the unsecured paths that are in our master page files currently.

One solution would be to render the entire site in https only, however this really scares me from an SEO standpoint. I don't know if I want to put my eggs in that basket.

Another solution is to structure the site so that secure pages are built differently from unsecured pages, but that requires a bit of re-structuring and new SOPs to be put in place.

I guess my question is really about best practices when using https.

• How can I avoid duplication issues?
• When do I need to use rel=canonical?
• What is the best way to do things here to avoid heavy maintenance moving forward?

[CleverPhD]

Don't go the whole site https route. You are just creating duplicate site nightmares.

Since you are working within a cart and auth pages you need to add a noindex nofollow meta tag on those pages to start with.  This way they don't get into the index to start with, also any pages that are in the index now will be dropped.  Do not use robots.txt for this, use the meta tag noindex nofollow.

You need to setup 301 redirects on all other pages from the https to the http version for all pages except the cart and auth pages (i.e those pages that are supposed to be https).  If Google has found any of those pages that are supposed to be http, then the 301 will correct that, plus you get the user back to the right version of the page for bookmarking and other purposes.

I

[CodyWheeler]

Thanks for the RE, but I'm not sure that answers my question. I'm looking for best practice information about how to build https content. The noindex tip is good. I'll do that. Just wondering how the back end should work to make sure I don't get "insecure content" warnings.

[CodyWheeler]

Any more input here? Are there any issues with using a sitewide rel=canonical to avoid the duplication of our https URLs?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Cody,

First of all, Google generally doesn't have much trouble  today with HTTPS content, and generally treats it and ranks just like anything else.

In fact, I'd say in a couple more years this may be the norm.

As for using rel canonical, you generally want to use it anytime there is a risk of duplicate content. In this case, the important thing is to use the full URL, and not relative URLs. So https://example.com. This should take care of 100% of your duplication issues.

I'm not an expert in https development (but I have a little experience) ithout diving too deep into how you serve your content, it's usually fine to serve file like javascript and images from both secure and non-secure paths. In this instance, you want to make sure your http files are calling relative file paths (as opposed to absolute) and make sure the content loads. 9 times out of 10 this works fine.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

[CodyWheeler]

Thanks for the RE Cyrus. One of my architects and I came to a similar conclusion, but it's definitely good to hear it from another source in the SEO community on the development side of things.

We decided to implement a side-wide rel=canonical to the http URLs to avoid duplication issues, as well as ensure resources are using relative links.

I'm hoping this solves each issue with minimal impact!