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
-
Installing SSL to website and site ranking
I am installing SSL to my website. Will it hurt my ranking in Google as the url will change and backlinks of the website are without ssl url.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Esnipper0 -
Will Regularly Adding New Blog Posts Improve Ranking?
We have added very little new website content in the last year. Our domain is www.metro-manhattan.com. Would adding a brand-new blog post once a week help improve our ranking in Google? A few years ago adding new content would've had quickly had a positive effect. Is that still the case? Or should we focus content creation resources in other areas such as social media? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Having possible problems with rankings due to development website
Hi all, I've got an interesting issue and a bit of a technical challenge for you. It's a bit complicated to explain, but please bear with me. We have a client website (http://clientwebsite.com) which we are having a hard time ranking in the past few months. Main keywords simply don't show up in Top100 searches, even though we are constantly building backlinks through Guest Posts, Citations, Media mentions, Profile links etc. Normally, we use ahrefs to look at the client's website backlinks, but just today we used Majestic to look at the backlink profile and one backlink stood out. This is a backlink from a development server (http://developmentwebsite.com) which redirects to http://clientwebsite.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg
The developers who were working on the redesign of the client website, put it up on their server and forgot to delete it.
Also, the content inside the development website is almost identical with the client website. We then checked to see if http://developmentwebsite.com is indexed.
It's not. Although, inside the robots file http://developmentwebsite.com/robots.txt there's:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
The funny (and weird thing) is that http://developmentwebsite.com/ and all development website inner pages are not indexed in Google. But if we go to http://developmentwebsite.com/inner-page, it doesn't redirect to the corresponding http://clientwebsite.com/inner-page, it's the same development website page URL and the pages even have links to the client website, but like I said, none of the pages of the development website are indexed, even though crawlers are allowed in the robots.txt's development website. In your opinion, could this be the reason why we are having a hard time to rank the client website? Second question is:
How do we approach in solving this issue?
Do we simply delete the whole http://developmentwebsite.com with all the inner pages?
Or should we do 301 redirrects on a per-page basis?0 -
Problems in indexing a website built with Magento
Hi all My name is Riccardo and i work for a web marketing agency. Recently we're having some problem in indexing this website www.farmaermann.it which is based on Magento. In particular considering google web master tools the website sitemap is ok (without any error) and correctly uploaded. However only 72 of 1.772 URL have been indexed; we sent the sitemap on google webmaster tools 8 days ago. We checked the structure of the robots.txt consulting several Magento guides and it looks well structured also.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | advmedialab
In addition to this we noticed that some pages in google researches have different titles and they do not match the page title defined in Magento backend. To conclude we can not understand if this indexing problems are related to the website sitemap, robots.txt or something else.
Has anybody had the same kind of problems? Thank you all for your time and consideration Riccardo0 -
Pages ending in .ad extension?
My company recently updated it's layout for thumbnails and property pages. Previously they displayed as /Property/123456-123%20MAIN%20Street-SPRINGFIELD-PA-98765 I know that was pretty bad URL structure so I was glad it was being changed, but now property pages are simply displaying as /6294888.ad What the heck is the .ad extension?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BD690 -
Is using dots in URL path really a problem?
we have a couple of pages displaying a dot in the URL path like domain.com/mr.smith/widget-mr.smith It displays fine in chrome, firefox and IE and for the user it may actually look better than replacing it by _ or -. Did this ever cause problems to anybody?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Any statement from google about it?
Should I change existing URLs? If so, which other characters can I use in the URL instead of underscore and dash, since in our system dash and underscore are already used for rewriting other characters. Thanks0 -
Crawling error or somthing else that male my page unvisible ( Simple problem, no solved yet )
Hi, my problem isn't solved and nobody was able to answer my question: why isn't my page poltronafraubrescia.zenucchi.it indexed for the keyword poltrona frau Brescia? The same page on another domain was four on the ranking reluts... And now it redirects to the new one... An you explain me how to proceed? I trust you... Help me...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guidoboem0 -
I have a duplicate content problem
The website guy that made the website for my business Premier Martial Arts Austin disappeared and didn't set up that www. was to begin each URL, so I now have a duplicate content problem and don't want to be penalized for it. I tried to show in Webmaster tools the preferred setup but can't get it to OK that I'm the website owner. Any idea as what to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OhYeahSteve0