Force SSL. Good or Bad?

[Stew222]

My website can be accessed with a number of different URL's and I am trying to consolidate the traffic to one point.  Is there any problem, SEO or technical, with forcing all users who come to my site to going to our https domain?  I have already set a preferred domain in WebMaster Tools and set rel=canonical for each page.  For instance, anyone entering the below sites would be forced to land at https://www.1099pro.com.

• 1099pro.com
• www.1099pro.com
• http://1099pro.com
• http://www.1099pro.com

[customerparadigm.com]

Michael -

I don't see any major SEO issues with forcing an SSL session, other than:

• SSL is usually a bit slower, due to the encryption overhead.  You might want to benchmark this to make sure it's not affecting your site load speed times.  If things are slow, more hardware and caching might help.

• Make sure that all of your content is being served from secure links.  For example, if you are displaying a graphic on the home page of the site, use relative paths (../images/super-impressive-graphic.png).  If you have content that uses absolute links, such as: (img src="http://www.1099pro.com/images/super-impressive-graphic.png), this will throw an SSL warning and tell users that the site is not secure.  This is important with CSS, as well as Facebook, Twitter and other plugins.

Looking at the site, it looks like your Google and LiveZilla tracking codes are set properly to auto-switch to https, but I'd try to test this.

• Also, if you're changing the URLs, you'll want to make sure that older pages with the non-www are 301 redirected to the secure pages properly, too.

Hope this helps!

Thanks,

• Jeff