Question #1: Does Google index https:// pages? I thought they didn't because....

[TylerAbernethy]

generally the difference between https:// and http:// is that the s (stands for secure I think) is usually reserved for payment pages, and other similar types of pages that search engines aren't supposed to index. (like any page where private data is stored)

My site that all of my questions are revolving around is built with Volusion (i'm used to wordpress) and I keep finding problems like this one.

The site was hardcoded to have all MENU internal links (which was 90% of our internal links) lead to **https://**www.example.com/example-page/

instead of

**http://**www.example.com/example-page/

To double check that this was causing a loss in Link Juice. I jumped over to OSE.

Sure enough, the internal links were not being indexed, only the links that were manually created and set to NOT include the httpS:// were being indexed.

So if OSE wasn't counting the links, and based on the general ideology behind secure http access, that would infer that no link juice is being passed...

Right??

Thanks for your time. Screens are available if necessary, but the OSE has already been updated since then and the new internal links ARE STILL NOT being indexed.

The problem is.. is this a volusion problem?

Should I switch to Wordpress?

here's the site URL (please excuse the design, it's pretty ugly considering how basic volusion is compared to wordpress)

http://www.uncommonthread.com/

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Tyler,

Great question! In fact, it's a common misconception that Google doesn't index https. In truth, these days they appear to index most https just fine.

If we do a site operator Google search for https on your site, we get something like this:

site:uncommonthread.com/ inurl:https (click to see results)

This returns 165 URLs on your site with the https protocol.

But.... these URLs don't show up in OSE because at this time, the Linkscape crawler can't crawl https. When it was originally built Google still didn't index https, so it wasn't needed. This should be fixed in just a few months and you should start seeing those https results in there. The good news is that OSE is completely separate from Google and doesn't influence your rankings in any way.

Now for the bad news....

Whenever you have https, you want to make sure you only have ONE version of the url, so that https either redirects (via 301) to the http version, or vice versa. Otherwise Google might index both versions. For example, both of these URLs resolve on your site:

https://www.uncommonthread.com/kb_results.asp?ID=5

http://www.uncommonthread.com/kb_results.asp?ID=5

The solution is to either 301 redirect one to the other, or have an absolute canonical tag on both pages that points to one or the other (an absolute canonical means it contains the full URL, including http or https)

That said, I don't see any evidence that Google has indexed both URL versions of your site (at least not like Dunkin Donuts

Should You Switch to Wordpress?

Based simply on the https issue, switching to Wordpress isn't necessary. But Wordpress does offer other advantages, and is generally a very SEO friendly platform.

There might be other considerations you may consider to switch away from your current CMS.

For example, consider Google's Text-only cache of your homepage: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.uncommonthread.com/default.asp&strip=1

See how barren it is? Without taking a deep dive, it's possible the structure and technology employed by your CMS is causing indexing/crawling issues, and considerable technical effort may be required to make it SEO friendly. I can't give you a definite answer either way, but it's something to think about.

Hope this helps!

[TylerAbernethy]

Wow. What an awesome answer.

I literally don't know if I can't thank you enough for taking the time to answer so wholesomely.

I decided to go ahead and fix the https:// and change it to http://

Weird results here.. Traffic went down by 5.5% compared to the month before I posted this thread.

I noticed an increase in duplicate title tags (about 700 - 1000 of them) in my seomoz account.

Could that be likely to be the reason for the decrease? Or is it just because I shouldn't have made such a drastic site-wide change like that?

I am attempting to give unique title tags, and html titles to all of those product pages that are causing the increases in duplicate titles

I also am in a slight predicament because she hired another company to do some "optimization" around October 23rd.

Since then, they have made some spammy changes in my opinion, but some results have shown up (20+% increase starting around Jan 1st, and capping on the day I made the https:// change), and I can't get her to agree with me that we should invest in building a Social following, making better content, and blogging more often, etc. I also think we should move the blog to be in a sub folder on the domain as well..

I compared the webcache you showed me to a wordpress site that i built and the difference really was pretty shocking

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.ontracparts.com

whats the difference as far as rankings and SEs are concerned?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Tyler

Looks like the duplicate title tags are largely from empty pages like these:

http://www.uncommonthread.com/008-Pink-Ice-p/14410008.htm

http://www.uncommonthread.com/001-Gold-p/14410001.htm

http://www.uncommonthread.com/019-Copper-p/14410019.htm

http://www.uncommonthread.com/027-Electric-Blue-p/14410027.htm

Even though these pages are somewhat unique, the content is definitely "thin" and having a lot of pages like this typically isn't good for rankings.

Ideally, you would list small product variations on the same page, or even have several similar product pages canonical to a master page. Generally if you don't have a 200 words minimum of good editorial content, Google might consider it duplicate.

I don't see any reason why switching to http should cause too much problem if you passed everything through a 301 redirect. To be honest, it's typical for rankings to fluxuate frequently so it could be a million things.

If I look at the text-only cache of the page you sent: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.ontracparts.com&strip=1

... it looks pretty similar. If it were my page, I'd probably try to include more descriptive text on the page, richer descriptions, ets.

Hope this helps!