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
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
-
Reasonable to Ask URL of Link from SEO Providing New Links before Link Activation?
My firm has hired an SEO to create links to our site. We asked the SEO to provide a list of domains that they are targeting for potential links. The SEO did not agree to this request on the grounds that the list is their unique intellectual property. Alternatively I asked the SEO to provide the URL that will be linking to our site before the link is activated. The SEO did not agree to this. However, they did say we could provide comments afterwards so they could tweak their efforts when the next 4-5 links are obtained next month. The SEO is adamant that the links will not be spam. For whatever it is worth the SEO was highly recommended. I am an end user; the owner and operator of a commercial real estate site, not an SEO or marketing professional. Is this protectiveness over process and data typical of link building providers? I want to be fair with the provider and hope I will be working with them a long time, however I want to ensure I receive high quality links. Should I be concerned? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Best way to link to 1000 city landing pages from index page in a way that google follows/crawls these links (without building country pages)?
Currently we have direct links to the top 100 country and city landing pages on our index page of the root domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
I would like to add in the index page for each country a link "more cities" which then loads dynamically (without reloading the page and without redirecting to another page) a list with links to all cities in this country.
I do not want to dillute "link juice" to my top 100 country and city landing pages on the index page.
I would still like google to be able to crawl and follow these links to cities that I load dynamically later. In this particular case typical site hiearchy of country pages with links to all cities is not an option. Any recommendations on how best to implement?0 -
Http - Https Issue
Hey there Mozzers, I have a site that few months ago went from being http - https. All the links redirect perfect but after scanning my site with Screaming Frog i get a bunch of 503 errors. After looking into my website I see that a lot of links in my content and menu have as a link the http url. For example my homepage has content that interlinks to the http version of the site. And even though when I test it it redirects correctly after scanning with Screaming frog it reports back as 503. Any ideas what's going on? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Link building… how to get high rewarding links?
Hi Guys, I have a few people whom I have built relationships up in my industry with that would like to link to my site. Is there any particular things I need to be mindful of before having them link to me? I'm just mindful of the unknown. Also, which links to use etc? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
HTTPS Login on HTTP Site | 301 or 302 Redirect?
I've searched the forum on this and online and can't seem to find a definitive answer. Some e-commerce sites that are http use a 302 redirect to the https login while other sites use a 301 redirect. I know 302 is generally not recommended but in this case it may make sense. Can anyone advise on the correct practice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CallMeNicholi0 -
HTTP Status Bad Request - 404, but also, add a 400 HTTP Status in certain circumstances?
We currently have a custom 404 page set up for our clients, but the developer has it returning a HTTP 200 for the status code. Big no, no. I'm having that fixed right now. My question is, currently, the custom 404 page is only returned for urls with the extension .aspx: For example : ilovepizza.com/pepperni.aspx would return a 404 page because the correct page is ilovepizza.com/pepperoni.aspx Any other format of URL without the extension (example ilovepizza.com/thumbtack) does not trigger the custom 404 page we've created, but it does trigger a server error with a 404 HTTP status page. I want to change this so this type of error also triggers the custom 404 page because it's more user-friendly and would return them to the website. My question: Is there any benefit to making the /thumbtack errors return the custom 404 page but with a 400 Bad Request HTTP Status? Kind of a novice here in those aspects, but does the 400 Bad Request status indicate that it was a user mistake and not a mistake created on the website? Other suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EEE30 -
301 vs. 404
If a listing on a website is no longer available to display is it better to resolve to a 301 redirect or use a 404? I know from an SEO point of view a 301 will pass on the link value, but is that as valuable as saying tto the user hey that page is no lonoger available try something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AU-SEO0 -
Link Architecture - Xenu Link Sleuth Vs Manual Observation Confusion
Hi, I have been asked to complete some SEO contracting work for an e-commerce store. The Navigation looked a bit unclean so I decided to investigate it first. a) Manual Observation Within the catalogue view, I loaded up the page source and hit Ctrl-F and searched "href", turns out there's 750 odd links on this page, and most of the other sub catalogue and product pages also have about 750 links. Ouch! My SEO knowledge is telling me this is non-optimal. b) Link Sleuth I crawled the site with Xenu Link Sleuth and found 10,000+ pages. I exported into Open Calc and ran a pivot table to 'count' the number of pages per 'site level'. The results looked like this - Level Pages 0 1 1 42 2 860 3 3268 Now this looks more like a pyramid. I think is is because Link Sleuth can only read 1 'layer' of the Nav bar at a time - it doesnt 'hover' and read the rest of the nav bar (like what can be found by searching for "href" on the page source). Question: How are search spiders going to read the site? Like in (1) or in (2). Thankyou!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalLeaf0