Confused About Problems Regarding Adding an SSL
-
After reading Cyrus' article: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl, I am now completely confused about what adding SSL could do to our site. Bluehost, our hosting provider, says if we get their SSL, they just add it to our site and it's up in a few hours: no problem whatsoever. If that's true, that'd be fantastic...however, if that's true, there wouldn't need to be like 10 things you're supposed to do (according to Cyrus' article) to ensure your rankings after the switch.
Can someone clarify this for me?
Thanks,
Ruben
-
Thanks Cyrus!
-
Hi Ruben,
Thanks for writing in. I'm unfamiliar with Bluehost's HTTPs service, but I assume they are taking care of top level issues. You'll still want to go through the checklist to make sure everything is valid and you follow SEO best practices.In short:
- Check your links
- Check your assets (images, CSS, javascript)
- Canonical tags
- Register with Google Webmaster Tools
- Update your sitemaps and robots.txt files
This covers the important stuff. As you noted, a few more tips here: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl
-
Maybe was obvious to everybody but 301 redirect for every single page is also a fundamental step, otherwise you are going to have broken external links, not to mention WMT which I don't think would be satisfied by just the canonical update.
Sitemap must be updated as well.
We recently switched a website from HTTP to HTTPS and in term of performance there was no difference after the update, at least according to WMT and analytics.
I was kind of scared before to update but at the end everything was smoother than expected, WMT took around 10 days to completely re-index the https version.
But of course we kept finding some non https link embedded here and there in some pages for days and we had to manually edit some content to avoid ssl warning from browsers.
-
I have no idea what CMS you are using but check the server side code generating the link, not just the code sent to the browser.
We recently switched to SSL, and our CMS was already building internal links on pages using the protocol of the http request.
-
Thanks Highland!
-
Great, thanks!
-
Ruben, I had a look at your website and your URLs all have HTTP in them so these would need to be updated all across your site before you make the switch to HTTPS. Because you are using WordPress this should be as simple as updating the site URL to https://www.kempruge.com.
The tip by @Highland about using Firebug is excellent. This will allow you to quickly debug if there are non-HTTPS links remaining - in the WordPress theme or template, for example.
Have a look at the WordPress HTTPS documentation also.
-
Hi Alex,
I'm not really sure if we use a protocol-less linking pattern or not. I don't see http:// in any of our urls, so if that's the criteria I'm guessing we don't? I included a screenshot of one of our URLs. Would you mind telling me if it's clear from the image whether we do or do not?
Thanks for your response. I really appreciate your time and input.
Best,
Ruben
-
One major tip I always point people to is that using protocol-less links for anything external is a great way to make sure your site always supports SSL without issue.
Firebug is a great way to make sure everything is loading HTTPS. Turn it on, switch to the Net tab, and load your page. It will show you every request sent as part of your page. It makes spotting non-SSL requests easy.
You can turn HSTS on yourself if your provider uses Apache and supports htaccess. (sorry I can't link an article, Moz won't let me). If they don't, you will have to have your host enable it on their end.
-
Implementing SSL should be straightforward for the most part
You need to ensure that links around your site (including canonical links) are updated to use HTTPS (so https://example.com/link as opposed to http://example.com/link where example.com is your domain name). If you are already using a protocol-less linking pattern (//example.com/link) you don't need to update the links.
You can also configure your web server to only serve HTTPS. If your web server is Apache you can do this with the SSLRequireSSL directive.
<code><location>SSLRequireSSL</location></code>
HTTPS also causes a significant slow-down as the browser and the server negotiate a secure connection. If your site has already been optimized for speed it should not cause a problem but if in doubt revisit that process and ensure that you are getting the best possible speed for your visitors.
The article by Cyrus has a great checklist to double check everything.
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
-
301 Redirects to relative URLs not absolute a problem?
Hi we recently did a migration and a lot of content changed locations see: https://d.pr/i/RvqI81 Basically, the 301 goes to the correct location but its a relative URL (as you can see from the screenshot) rather than absolute URL. Do you think this is a high priority issue from an SEO standpoint, should we get the developer to change the redirects to absolute? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cathywix0 -
JavaScript navigation causing an SEO problem?
Hi - I'm looking at a site using JavaScript dropdown navigation - Google can crawl the whole site but my thinking is this - If I ensure the dropdown navigation is functioning fully when JS is switched off, I may facilitate the search engine bots? At the moment I can't get any dropdown effect if I turn JS off on the site but if I look at a cached page (text version) the dropdown links are visible and working. I am wondering whether any crawl benefit is there if you take this a step further and ensure the drop downs are actually visible and working when JS is switched off? I would welcome your thoughts on this. Thanks in advance, Luke - 07966 729775
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Adding Video-Effective Means of Generating Quality Links?
Is adding video to URLs create a higher quantity/quality of incoming links than adding new text? Our firm operates a commercial real estate web site (www.metro-manhattan.com) in New York City. This niche is highly competitive. Our link profile is pretty weak. We have about 30-40 neighborhood pages among many others. These neighborhood based pages are text based. Would adding a video clip with pertinent information about these neighborhoods attract links? Basically the question is if video is effective link bait. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
SSL Certificate valid for SEO https
Hi everybody! I have talked with my hosting provider and he offers me two kind of SSL. I've read that the best option for SEO is to convert the hole site to https response (not only the payment pages), but my developer team is telling me that this kind of security to the whole site will be negative for all the websites contained under this IP ¡! So I wonder if somebody who has the https implemented correctly and working properly for SEO could recommend me: which kind of certificate is the correct one and what specific things sould I consider with my hosting provider if it's true that could be a disaster if I implement the https to the whole website beacause I'm blocking the robots and it's dangerous for my domains in this server Please, any help would be really appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Estherpuntu0 -
Website penalised can't find where the problem is. Google went INSANE
Hello, I desperately need a hand here! Firstly I just want to say that I we never infracted google guidelines as far as we know. I have been around in this field for about 6 years and have had success with many websites on the way relying only in natural SEO and was never penalised until now. The problem is that our website www.turbosconto.it is and we have no idea why. (not manual) The web has been online for more than 6 months and it NEVER started to rank. it has about 2 organic visits a day at max. In this time we got several links from good websites which are related to our topic which actually keep sending us about 50 visits a day. Nevertheless our organic visita are still 1 or 2 a day. All the pages seem to be heavily penalised ... when you perform a search for any of our "shops"even including our Url, no entries for the domain appear. A search example: http://www.turbosconto.it zalando What I will expect to find as a result: http://www.turbosconto.it/buono-sconto-zalando The same case repeats for all of the pages for the "shops" we promote. Searching any of the brads + our domain shows no result except from "nike" and "euroclinix" (I see no relationship between these 2) Some days before for these same type of searches it was showing pages from the domain which we blocked by robots months ago, and which go to 404 error instead of our optimised landing pages which cannot be found in the first 50 results. These pages are generated by our rating system... We already send requests to de index all theses pages but they keep appearing for every new page that we create. And the real pages nowhere to be found... Here isan example: http://www.turbosconto.it/shops/codice-promozionale-pimkie/rat
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sebastiankoch
You can see how google indexes that for as in this search: site:www.turbosconto.it rate Why on earth will google show a page which is blocked by the robots.txt displaying that the content cannot retrieved because it is blocked by the robots instead of showing pages which are totally SEO Friendly and content rich... All the script from TurboSconto is the same one that we use in our spanish version www.turbocupones.com. With this last one we have awesome results, so it makes things even more weird... Ok apart from those weird issues with the indexation and the robots, why did a research on out backlinks and we where surprised to fin a few bad links that we never asked for. Never the less there are just a few and we have many HIGH QUALITY LINKS, which makes it hard to believe that this could be the reason. Just to be sure we, we used the disavow tool for these links, here are the bad links we submitted 2 days ago: domain: www.drilldown.it #we did not ask for this domain: www.indicizza.net #we did not ask for this domain: urlbook.in #we did not ask for this, moreover is a spammy one http://inpe.br.way2seo.org/domain-list-878 #we did not ask for this, moreover is a spammy one http://shady.nu.gomarathi.com/domain-list-789 #we did not ask for this, moreover is a spammy one http://www.clicdopoclic.it/2013/12/i-migliori-siti-italiani-di-coupon-e.html #we did not ask for this, moreover and is a copy of a post of an other blog http://typo.domain.bi/turbosconto.it I have no clue what can it be, we have no warning messages in the webmaster tools or anything.
For me it looks as if google has a BUG and went crazy on judging our italian website. Or perhaps we are just missing something ??? If anyone could throw some light on this I will be really glad and willing to pay some compensation for the help provided. THANKS A LOT!0 -
Has anyone ever seen this canonicalization problem with Google?
I recently move my site (www.leatherhidestore.com/servlet/StoreFront) off of the ProStores platform because I could never get Google to show my homepage in SERP results - instead always selecting random product pages to rank. However, I never had this problem with Yahoo and Bing as they always defaulted to the homepage except when the category was a better match. Fast forward and I have just launched the site (www.leatherhidestore) on Magento Community and I STILL CANNOT GET GOOGLE TO USE MY HOMEPAGE FOR SERP RESULTS although I'm getting okay SERPS for random pages.....ERRRRRR! Of course, as if to rub salt in the wound, Yahoo and Bing are behaving just perfect. Still, I must think that if my Google would recognize my homepage (where the PR is and backlinks point to) I would be doing 10x better. I am showing duplicate page content and title problems which the developer is trying to solve but I do not know if this will fix the homepage Google issue. I feel like I must be in some sort of canonicalization death spiral. Has anybody dealt with this issue before and will mercifully share what I should do to fix it...please! Hunter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leatherhidestore0 -
Adding Orphaned Pages to the Google Index
Hey folks, How do you think Google will treat adding 300K orphaned pages to a 4.5 million page site. The URLs would resolve but there would be no on site navigation to those pages, Google would only know about them through sitemap.xmls. These pages are super low competition. The plot thickens, what we are really after is to get 150k real pages back on the site, these pages do have crawlable paths on the site but in order to do that (for technical reasons) we need to push these other 300k orphaned pages live (it's an all or nothing deal) a) Do you think Google will have a problem with this or just decide to not index some or most these pages since they are orphaned. b) If these pages will just fall out of the index or not get included, and have no chance of ever accumulating PR anyway since they are not linked to, would it make sense to just noindex them? c) Should we not submit sitemap.xml files at all, and take our 150k and just ignore these 300k and hope Google ignores them as well since they are orhpaned? d) If Google is OK with this maybe we should submit the sitemap.xmls and keep an eye on the pages, maybe they will rank and bring us a bit of traffic, but we don't want to do that if it could be an issue with Google. Thanks for your opinions and if you have any hard evidence either way especially thanks for that info. 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw0 -
What is the time of impact of a link regarding to rankings?
I own a website in a pretty semi-competitive market (220 000 searches a month for my main keyword). I've been doing some intensive linkbuilding with some good results. I got around 10 links from organisations, schools and websites of city halls, all of them, the pages being at least pagerank 3 or 4. I let some time pass inbetween, to let Google craw the pages I got the links from and most of them also start to appear in my GWT. The thing is, my rankings havn't improved anything, they are doing quite some Google dancing, staying around position 50. I got the links about 2 months ago (April). When checking other websites in my market, they all have fewer links and mostly low quality. My website itself is also pretty good, all unique content, updated pretty often, around 100 pages of content. All on-site SEO is done as it should be. Am I just being impatient? Or should i start digging deeper?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | internetrepublic
What, on average, is the 'impact time' of decent links on your rankings in a semi-competitive market?? Thanks!0