Http:// vs Https:// in Og:URL

[SameerBhatia]

Hi,

Recently, we have migrated our website from http:// to https://. Now, every URL is in https:// and we have used 301 permanent redirection for redirecting OLD URL's to New Ones.

We have planned to include http:// link in og:url instead of https:// due to some social share issues we are facing. My concern is, if Google finds the self http:// URL on every page of my blog, will Google gets confused with http and https:// as we are providing the old URL to Google for crawling.

Please advice.

Thanks

[Nigel_Carr]

I think you probably know what I am going to say!

If you put the HTTP version of the URL you are sending out conflicting signs to Google by telling them that both pages exist. By sharing the HTTP links on Socials you are also creating needles redirects. There is conjecture, still, as to whether 301 causes any loss of link juice, but personally I'm with Rand Fishkin, that there will be a small loss of link juice suffered by having a redirect in place (Others - this is not the place to argue about this!), so I would make it as clear as possible without any HTTP mentions on the page whatsoever.

I'm not sure what you mean about 'social share issues' but maybe I can help? what are they?

Any SEO audit software will tell you the same - if you move to HTTPS then use the correct URL otherwise the software will scream with warnings.

Regards

Nigel

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

What I'm guessing is that Sameer has a significant amount of URLs that have a ton of shares. So some numbers around social share counts might be off due to that. Anyway, what you could evaluate is if you can change the OG urls for only new articles. In the end HTTPS is also the new reality for you, so you might just best suck it up and change it to HTTPS. Likely the impact will be low.

[ThompsonPaul]

Yea, this is a stupid screwup by Facebook because they won't fix their system to simply recognise the HTTP and HTTPS URLs are the same. (Others like Google+ got this figured out ages ago.)

Mentioning the HTTP URL for your OG data won't do any harm. It's the same as all the other websites out there with previous links still pointing to your old HTTP address. The 301-redirect and the hew HTTPS sitemap will give crawlers overwhelming directive of the correct URLs to index. (And in fact, the OG URL isn't even technically a link, so crawlers likely aren't even following it.)

As Martijn says though - you're kind of in limbo. The pages will show the old counts, but won't be aggregating the new counts. There are some plugins for WordPress that purport to be able to combine both, but I haven't used one yet.

Paul

[SameerBhatia]

Thanks for sharing the informative answers. @ThompsonPaul Which Wordpress Plugin we can use to save the Facebook share count?

[ThompsonPaul]

Shareaholic and Social Warfare (paid) plugins are the ones I'm familiar with, Sameer. There is also a paid add-on for Sassy Social Share plugin that will accomplish this too. Others may have also added this capability.

P.