Https vs Http Link Equity
-
Hi Guys,
So basically have a site which has both HTTPs and HTTP versions of each page.
We want to consolidate them due to potential duplicate content issues with the search engines.
Most of the HTTP pages naturally have most of the links and more authority then the HTTPs pages since they have been around longer. E.g. the normal http hompage has 50 linking root domains while the https version has 5.
So we are a bit concerned of adding a rel canonical tag & telling the search engines that the preferred page is the https page not the http page (where most of the link equity and social signals are).
Could there potentially be a ranking loss if we do this, what would be best practice in this case?
Thanks,
Chris
-
Good answers!
If you do 301 redirect to all https pages would this cause issues with previous rel canonical tags which point to http version of the page.
E.g. this page
http://www.the upside sport.com/sale/women/hoodies/recovery-hoodie-coral
Has a rel canonical pointing to (which is correct):
http://www.the upsidesport.com/recovery-hoodie-coral
Then if i implement a 301 redirect to the https version the correct version would be:
https://www.theupsidesport.com/recovery-hoodie-coral
But the rel canonical would be to the non-http page unless i change it. Would this cause issues if i don't change the rel canonical tags to the https version.
- Chris
-
The https ranking signal is a tiebreaker assuming that all other ranking factors are the same
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-https-dealbreaker-20632.html
You have to decide if you have other reasons to go https site wide. Are people logging in? Are you having them provide sensitive data? That is the reason you move.
If you do want to move everything to https: use the 301 redirect. It will probably be a wash in the end. You lose a little bit of link equity in a 301, but in a tie, you would "win" thanks to the https and assuming that the other page is http. The key to the 301 is to have the 301 be page to page and not global in nature. If you use a 301 and you redirect a page to another that is not on the same topic, you will lose link equity. Google does this so that if you have a page that has a lot of link equity for the topic "red widgets" and then 301 redirect that page to one on "purple fruit" the link equity is lost. You have to redirect the "red widget" page to the new page on "red widgets" to have that pass through. Otherwise, you are just using the 301 to help move people along to the new page, which is not a bad idea, but something you need to think about none the less.
I would not use the canonical as the http to https is not really what it was meant to be used for.
In the end, just be consistent and it will all work out as there are a ton of other factors that are more important to help you rank.
Cheers!
-
Hi Chris,
I am in agreement that taking the route of canonical would not be as beneficial as 301. Remember that a canonical is just a suggestion to Google and they can still opt to ignore this if they wish.
I would avoid any possible complications here and 301. It is understood that a rel=canonical passes page rank in the same way that a 301 does, with a minor loss, but as far as I am aware, there is no actual testing to show which passes more / less.
-Andy
-
Ok, so here is a thing why do you want to switch from http to https version? If this is because of the fact that it helps Google rankings, I would suggest not go for it as it only give you a small benefit (if any).
If your website is small and there are only few pages then going for 301 redirection is a good idea just 301 redirect your pages so that link juice transfers to the preferred version.
If your website is big and you think that rel canonical is the only solution, my idea is to go with http version as moving https without redirection will hurt your rankings to a good extent.
Again, this is pretty much depends upon what your end goal is… so decide what you want to achieve at the end of the day and act accordingly.
Hope this helps!
-
Hi,
In above case you must use 301 redirects to point all HTTP URLs to HTTPS to pass link juice from http to https or the link juice isn’t going to pass over.
Hope this helps
Thanks
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
-
Category VS Post
I use my website for providing an international service, I made my URL structure website https://example.com/destinations/africa/country destinations is a category and Africa is a sub-category I made an article for every continent and inserted all the continent's country manually, the page url structure is https://example.com/destinations/africa/ and the continent category URL is https://example.com/category/destinations/africa/ I'm thinking about removing the continent article and strip the category Word from URL, So i will use the subcategories directly on the same link https://example.com/destinations/africa/ what's your advice about removing the continent article and using the sub categories instead? is it a good idea to use the child category as a reference for the internal links? what do you think about keeping both of them (child category and the Article)? in case you suggest to use the child category , Is removing Category word may hurt my SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | batot_mahmoud0 -
Bad Domain Links - Penguin? - Moz vs. Search Console Stats?
I've been trying to figure out why my site www.stephita.com has lost it's google ranking the past few years. I had originally thought it was due to the Panda updates, but now I'm concerned it might be because of the Penguin update. Hard for me to pinpoint, as I haven't been actively looking at my traffic stats the past years. So here's what I just noticed. On my Google Search Console - Links to your Site, I discovered there are 301 domains, where over 75% seem to be spammy. I didn't actively create those links. I'm using the MOZ - Open site Explorer tool to audit my site, and I noticed there is a smaller set of LINKING DOMAINS, at about 70 right now. Is there a reason, why MOZ wouldn't necessarily find all 300 domains? What's the BEST way to clean this up??? I saw there's a DISAVOW option in the Google Search Console, but it states it's not the best way, as I should be contacting the webmasters of all the domains, which is I assume impossible to get a real person on the other end to REMOVE these link references. HELP! 🙂 What should I do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TysonWong0 -
Https Verus http
We recently changed our eCommerce site to a https from a http and we have seen a slight drop in rankings. Should we have not changed the who site over or was it the right call? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Can I have my blog on http and the rest of the site on https?
I have an ecommerce site that is on https. We have a Wordpress blog for blogging, but we also have our help section located on it. I used a plugin to switch the blog to https but now have a few problems. 1. My sitemap generator still shows the blog as http and Google gives me a warning for the redirect. 2. When trying to use the Moz page grader I was told that I was in a redirect loop. 3. The pages do not seem to be getting indexed. It is a blog so there is never any information exchanged that is private. Would I be ok with just switching it to http? Or would Google see that as two different sites even though they have the same domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Redirect old "not found" url (at http) to new corresponding page (now at https)
My least favorite part of SEO 😉 I'm trying to redirect an old url that no longer exists to our new website that is built with https. The old url: http://www.thinworks.com/palm-beach-gardens-team/ New url: https://www.thinworks.com/palm-beach-gardens/ This isn't working with my standard process of the quick redirection plugin in WP or through htaccess because the old site url is at http and not https. Any help would be much appreciated! How do I accomplish this, where do I do it and what's the code I'd use? Thank you Moz community! Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SUCCESSagency0 -
Links in body text
From a purely SEO /link juice perspective, is there any benefit to linking from body text to a page that is in a pervasive primary navigation? The primary nav puts a link at the top of the HTML. With the tests done by members of this site, the "first link counts" rule negates the link juice value of a link in the body text if there is already a link in the nav. Now I've also seen the data on using hash tags to get a second or third link, but ignoring that, it would seem that links in the body text to pages in the nav have zero effect. This brings me to another question - block level navigation. If anchor text links pass more juice than links in the top navigation, why would you put your most coveted target pages in the top nav? You would be better off building links in the content, which would create a poor user experience. To me, the theory that anchor text links in the body pass more juice than links in the primary nav doesn't make any sense. Can someone please explain this to me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
SubDomain vs. SubFolder
I know this subject has been discussed many, many times before. But it is now 2013, and Google continues to tweak and change their algo to build upon the best delivered results for users. So the questions are: Does Google still treat subdomains as a completely separate and unique domain from the root? If so, is it a good SEO strategy to split up, when it fits, a website into subdomains with links pointing back to the root or main domain? As a company we have several subdomains with some of our categories. For example our main site is www.iboats.com. This site has all our boat products. But we set up subdomains several years ago for the following: boatcovers.iboats.com boatpropellers.iboats.com biminitops.iboats.com And we have our fourms as a subdomain: forums.iboats.com Splitting them out were originally done for SEO reasons, but now is more for better managing our main categories. It appears that Google is treating our subdomains as part of our main root domain anyway, so I don't see the SEO value anymore. If we were to move the subdomains into subfolders of the root, I'm wondering if we might see a boost in SEO value having more pages within the main website? I'd be interested in everyone's thoughts on this subject.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tdawson090 -
Google, Links and Javascript
So today I was taking a look at http://www.seomoz.org/top500 page and saw that the AddThis page is currently at the position 19. I think the main reason for that is because their plugin create, through javascript, linkbacks to their page where their share buttons reside. So any page with AddThis installed would easily have 4/5 linbacks to their site, creating that huge amount of linkbacks they have. Ok, that pretty much shows that Google doesn´t care if the link is created in the HTML (on the backend) or through Javascript (frontend). But heres the catch. If someones create a free plugin for wordpress/drupal or any other huge cms platform out there with a feature that linkbacks to the page of the creator of the plugin (thats pretty common, I know) but instead of inserting the link in the plugin source code they put it somewhere else, wich then is loaded with a javascript code (exactly how AddThis works). This would allow the owner of the plugin to change the link showed at anytime he wants. The main reason for that would be, dont know, an URL address update for his blog or businness or something. However that could easily be used to link to whatever tha hell the owner of the plugin wants to. What your thoughts about this, I think this could be easily classified as White or Black hat depending on what the owners do. However, would google think the same way about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bemcapaz0