6 replies to this topic

[SERPico]

Hi Guys,

I want to turn a existing HTTP page to HTTPS which in itself is a new process for me but I'm also wondering about the SEO aspect of it?

So how would this work?

Can i keep the regular HTTP links and will somewhere along the lines the page be switched to HTTPS on the server side?
Or do in need to change the page links to HTTPS?

Should the HTTP links be transformed to HTTPS on the server side then it would be wise to exclude the HTTPS pages somehow but what is the best way to do this?

Exclude the page name in the robots.txt?
What would the best to handle this and what should i keep in mind?

Thanks in advance for your replies!

[Randy]

I'm a bit confused by the question I think. Are you moving the entire site to the HTTPS side of things? Or just an individual page?

As far as your links go, it depends upon how you're linking to those in your code. For instance, if I were on the HTTPS version of your site/page and you had referential linking code like:

CODE

<a href="/somepage.html">Link to SomePage</a>

I would go to the HTTPS version of SomePage. With referential links the HTTP/HTTPS stays the same as it is.

On the other hand if you used an absolute link like:

CODE

<a href="https://www.domain.com/somepage.html">Link to SomePage</a>

I would go to the HTTPS version of the page. No matter what version I was currently on.

And on the third hand if you used an absolute link like:

CODE

<a href="http://www.domain.com/somepage.html">Link to SomePage</a>

I would go to the non-secure page. No matter what version I was currently on.

The best way to handle it depends upon what you're going to be doing (see question above) and what the end goal is going to be. The engines are going to see the HTTP and HTTPS versions of each page as being Unique because they're at unique addresses. So if you're going to have both --and if the spiders are going to be able to get to both-- you'll probably want to control spider access to one or the other.

[allendover1]

Got a question to add to this - this question was a good one as well I had given NO thought to thus far.

We will sometime this year change over to https. Is it possible in a CMS - such as Joomla just make your shopping cart https and the rest of the site http? This might be a pretty dum question but just learning before I make that move.

Thanks all.

Allen

[Randy]

It depends upon your hosting setup and the software you're using Allen. As a very general rule when a server has HTTPS/SSL enabled, it's enabled for every single page on the domain. There are ways to control what gets indexed on which though if you're careful and thoughtful in your internal linkage.

For instance, if you use absolute linking code you can make sure the cart links were always HTTPS and the normal pages were always HTTP. The important thing being that the search engine spiders won't know and won't try to guess that an HTTPS version of a page exists if it's never linked to. And vice versa.

What a lot of people do with their carts is make them all HTTP (non-secure) up to and until the user needs to start adding products to their cart, entering their payment information, etc. At that point real users get moved over to HTTPS for their own protection. The trick being that those "links" are actually little <form> submissions in HTML-speak. Meaning the users think they're simply clicking on a link to add a product, but if you look in the raw html code you'll see that it's actually sending data to another page via a <form> tag, <input> fields and such.

This works out to just fine for the search engines. Since they do not submit forms (they avoid them like the plague actually) they never see the HTTPS version of those pages. However they do see your original HTTP cart pages that have all of the product descriptions and such.

[SERPico]

Hi Randy,

It's only a couple of pages of the site

So it wouldn't be possible that whenever someone clicks the HTTP link it will be directed to the HTTPS version of the same page?
I would like to keep my link structure as it is for consistency, question is if that is possible how do i block the HTTPS version from getting indexed?

I can only add a /page & /directories in the robots.txt right?

Is there a way to use .htaccess so that whenever the HTTP link in question is clicked it will be redirected to the HTTPS version and block it through robots.txt or other method of controlling spider access?

Thanks!

[Randy]

Is there a way to use .htaccess so that whenever the HTTP link in question is clicked it will be redirected to the HTTPS version and block it through robots.txt or other method of controlling spider access?

Yes there is a way to use htaccess to do both, though it is a bit convoluted.

Let's say you had two files named "purchase.php" and "buy.php" that you wanted to automagically redirect to the HTTPS side of things, even if the link would normally send people to the HTTP version.

CODE

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} purchase.php [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} buy.php
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=302,L]

Note that I'm using a 302 redirect above instead of a 301. I chose this to help keep the spiders from conferring any link pop on through to the final HTTPS url. Not perfect, but might as well use a 302 while we're there. FYI, the Not Secure Port 443 part is in there to keep from creating an endless loop when people are pulling those files from the HTTPS side of things.

To serve up a different robots.txt file for HTTPS requests uses the Server Port again, and gives the spiders a different robots.txt file. It would look like:

CODE

RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ^443$
RewriteRule ^robots.txt$ robots_ssl.txt

Then you'd create a new text file names robots_ssl.txt that contains the following and upload it to the root level of your site.

CODE

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Make sense?

[SERPico]

I think it does Randy

I'll review it couple of times more when I'm actually setting everything up and should i get stuck with something I'll let you know

Thank you so much Randy for your reply