Proper method of consolidating https to http?
-
A client has an application area of the site (a directory) that has a form and needs to be secured with ssl. The vast majority of the site is static, and does not need to be secured. We have experienced situations where a visitor navigates the site as https which then throws security errors. We want to keep static visitors on http; (and crawlers) and only have visits to the secure area display as ssl. How is this best accomplished?
Our developer wants to add a rule to the global configuration file in php that uses a 301 redirect to ensure static pages are accessed as http, and the secure directory is accessed as https. Is the the proper protocol? Are there any SEO considerations we should make?
Thanks.
-
Hi there,
I would agree with your developer in using 301 redirects to ensure all static pages resolve only to the HTTP version while the secure pages resolve only to HTTPS.
As for SEO, the search engines should follow these 301 redirects just fine, but it might also be a good idea to designate canonical URLs to tell the search engines only to index non-HTTPS pages just to be safe. The PHP code below automatically detects which version of the page is being accessed and automatically inserts a canonical tag to tell the search engines to only index the non-HTTPS versions.
$currenturl= $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
//Check if it is using the secure https port which is 443
if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] == “443″) {//connected to secure port, formulate the http canonical version
$canonicalversion=”http://”.$currenturl;//echo the canonical version to the HTML as link rel canonical tag
echo ‘’;
}
?>
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My ranking drop after migrating to https
Hey, I have migrated my website from http to https. But, all my ranking is dropped from first page to 3 or 4 page or some keywords are disappeared. I have redirected all my urls to https and done everything properly. Please help me. My website is justinterio.com
Technical SEO | | vikrantrathore1 -
Moving from http to https - what do I need to do in Google Search Console?
Hi all, I have moved my site from http to https. I current have two profiles in Google Search Console: http://mysite.com
Technical SEO | | Bee159
http://www.mysite.com Do I need to set up the same but with https and if so, what do I then do with the http profiles? Do I delete them? Or just remove the sitemaps? Confused.0 -
Is site: a reliable method for getting full list of indexed pages?
The site:domain.com search seems to show less pages than it used to (Google and Bing). It doesn't relate to a specific site but all sites. For example, I will get "page 1 of about 3,000 results" but by the time I've paged through the results it will end and change to "page 24 of 201 results". In that example If I look in GSC it shows 1,932 indexed. Should I now accept the "pages" listed in site: is an unreliable metric?
Technical SEO | | bjalc20112 -
Switching site from http to https. Should I do entire site?
Good morning, As many of you have read, Google seems to have confirmed that they will give a small boost to sites with SSL certificates this morning. So my question is, does that mean we have to switch our entire site to https? Even simple information pages and blog posts? Or will we get credit for the https boost as long as the sensitive parts of our site have it? Anybody know? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | rayvensoft1 -
Authority site drastic ranking drop after google https switch. Please Help!
Hi Mozers. Since Google switched to the https version, our company website (http://we.register.it) indexing switched to the https version (https://www.register.it). After that the ranking on Google dropped for almost every keyword. The site is very old and got a great authority and PR 7. It ranked for same keywords for very long time On each page from years there is the correct meta rel canonical. No spam, and WMT is ok. Could you please help? The internal links are all in http, and in https. If you are https are in https (they are all relatives) No changes have been made and the subdomain is in that way from 8 years: the main url has always been http://we.register.it Google started this indexing switch around the 15 October
Technical SEO | | luca_cash0 -
Another http vs https Question?
Is it better to keep the Transaction/ Payment pages on a commercial website as the only secure ones (https) and remainder of website as http? Or is it better to have all the commercial website as secure (https)?
Technical SEO | | sherohass0 -
Does having a page (or site) available on HTTP and HTTPS cause duplication issues?
Say I've got a site that can be accessed using either protocal (i.e. HTTP and HTTPS), but most (if not all of the links) are pointing to the HTTP versions. Will it cause a problem if I start link building to HTTPS versions? In other words does google see http://mysite.com as the same page as https://mysite.com? Thanks
Technical SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
Https redirect
Hi there, a client of mine is asking me if Google would penalize to redirect from all the http urls to https (they want to change the security protocol). I assume it is going to work as a classic 301, right? so they might lose some authority in they way, but I am not 100% sure. Can anyone confirm this? does anyone has a similar experience? thanks a lot!
Technical SEO | | elisainteractive0