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Hi guys and girls, With regards to this, ss there any problem for SEO that you can see with banning spam refers through Htaccess? So in these instances when a spam bots comes to the site, we throw a "Forbidden You don't have permission to access / on this server.", so basically a 403 error? We're considering this as a more permanent solution to using filters in GA. What do you think? Thanks, Gill.

Logan is correct, whenever you use a 301 redirect from one page on your domain to the same domain the link equity is passed (all of it, 100 percent). So, migrating from http to https isn't going to hurt at all. You won't lose any link equity. I still prefer to updated any links on other sites whenever I can, such as links from social media profiles, etc. and any other links I can get updated.