e-Commerce SEO Challenges of HTTPS
Name 路 Title 路 Dunn Solutions
Dirk Lester 路 SEO Consultant 路 Dunn Solutions
08/18/2016
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Today’s Agenda
What is HTTP and what is HTTPS
HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol, it’s a simple way to send and receive text based messages and it’s the most frequently used protocol on the web. It’s the kind technology that’s invisible because it’s
ubiquitous. Similarly, HTTPS stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure. It’s the same protocol as HTTP, but the text is encrypted using Transport Layer Security (SSL). So when you see HTTP in your browser’s
address bar it’s unencrypted and when you see HTTPS the connection from your customer and your website is encrypted. Migrating to HTTPS and installing the SSL certificate that requires won’t change the look of your site. But visitors will see their browser bar status change to indicate that your site is an HTTPS.
What Are the Benefits of HTTPS vs HTTP It's so rare for Google to reveal its actual ranking factors that figuring out what they are is a profession, so in 2014 when Google announced they’d be rewarding websites using HTTPS encryption with higher search results it was surprising. But as rankings factors go, Implementing HTTPS entails a few risks and some cost. Webmasters balance them out with benefits including:
More Referral Traffic Data Using HTTPS Will Be a Rankings Boost Gives You a Security and Privacy Boost
More Referral Traffic Data
Most e-commerce sites use a setup where visitors shop on HTTP and checkout on HTTPS. But when traffic passes from a non-secure HTTP website to a secure HTTPS website, the referral
traffic data is stripped away. The traffic shows up in Google Analytics as 'Direct.' Which is a problem because you can never quite tell where your most valuable traffic is actually coming from. But once you have an all HTTPS site, all of your referral traffic information is preserved.
Using HTTPS Will Be a Rankings Boost It’s been almost exactly two years since Google introduced a real time rankings signal designed to encourage site owners to migrate their websites from HTTP to HTTPS that gave HTTPS websites a comparatively small rankings boost. When it was first rolled out it seemed to function on a one vs one basis. Which just means that whenever the algorithm had to decide between two websites competing for the same position, it would award the higher ranking to the HTTP site. That said, just this week, we’ve actually seen a fairly sharp uptick in the Google rankings of HTTPS sites, indicating that they’ve cranked up the importance of the signal. When asked, Google said they hadn’t tweaked the HTTPS ranking boost but that “no” usually means they have.
Gives You a Security and Privacy Boost If you’ve had any exposure to this topic, you’ve probably heard that HTTPS can only offer you an advantage if your website uses sensitive passwords. But that isn’t really true. But even average everyday, non-commerce sites, can benefit from HTTPS privacy and security in the following ways: • • •
HTTPS ensures that the website is the one the server it is supposed to be talking to HTTPS prevents Man-in-the-middle hacking, making your website more secure HTTPS encrypts communications, including URLs, so it protects visitor browsing history and credit card numbers
SEO Best Practices for HTTPS Migration You don’t need to be concerned when switching from your site from HTTP to HTTPS for the rankings boost.
Google was telling webmasters that it was safe to do so for years before their 2014 rankings announcement. Unfortunately hat doesn’t mean that you won’t need to properly communicate to Google that you’ve moved your site from HTTP to HTTPS and take these two steps to ensure your website’s traffic doesn’t suffer.
Use Relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
Decide the kind of SSL certificate you need, single, use 2048-bit certificates and keep it up to date
Use Relative URLs in Your Internal Links There are two types of URLs that can be used in
internal links, Absolute and Relative. With an absolute URL, you include the entire web
address of any page that you’re linking to in the link. You literally hard-code your full domain, in each and every link, http//www.site.com/topic. That's using an absolute URL. Which presents
an obvious problem in the context of an HTTP to HTTPS migration. Fortunately it’s possible to
code internal links as relative URLs instead. A relative URL is just /topic. Essentially what that does is rely on a visitor’s web browser to
assume that: This link is pointing to a page on the same site we're on so I’m just going to go there. So using Relative URLs simplifies your
redirects needs.
Use The Right, Up to Date, SSL Certificate
First, what is an SSL certificate? An SSL certificate is a digital public document that ensures that visitors access the site they want to visit by demonstrating ownership. If you’re an e-commerce site owner, an SSL prevents third party attackers from impersonating their website. For your customers, your SSL certificate will establish a secure connection between their web browser and your site that protects information like passwords and credit card details by adding a layer of encryption when their data is sent back and forth.
Use 2048-bit key certificates SSL Certificates are time sensitive, you’ll need to keep yours up to date or risk the above result There are single, multi-domain and wildcard certificates, so you’ll need to get one that matches your needs
SEO Challenges to Overcome with HTTPS
The main SEO issues we typically see after HTTP to HTTPS migrations result from site owners neglecting to set the HTTPS site as the preferred version and leaving the HTTP version live. Because doing so means that there are as
many as four versions of a site online and that can result in:
Duplicate Content Penalties
Back Link Dilution
Search Engine Crawl Budget Wastage
Duplicate Content? What do we mean by Duplicate Content? Well, onsite duplicate content refers to content that appears on
two or more pages of your website. Now, the best way to get into why duplicate content is bad is to explain why unique content is good. It works like this: Having unique content sets you site apart. If you’re using the
same copy to describe your services as your competitors, Google has no basis to give your site a rankings advantage. Having the same word for word text on a WWW and a non-WWW URL or an HTTP and an HTTPS URL or all four URLs, diminishes the value of your content. Google doesn’t want to offer multiple
pages that repeat one another in results, so the algorithm looks for content that’s unique between competitors.
Backlink Dilution?
Google ranks your website based on two categories of factors. On Page factors, meaning your site’s
code + content and Off Page factors that vary but pretty much all boil down to Back Links. Which means that basically every time someone links to your website by bookmarking it on del.icio.us or sharing it onto their LinkedIn feed, Google gives you points for it. Unfortunately, having two or four
versions of site live means that different users will come across the different versions then share and link accordingly. So the points for the links will be divided between two or four URLs rather than one.
Search Engine Crawl Budget? There are three things to understand here. First, your site’s “Crawl Budget” equals the number of
URLs Google will crawl each time it visits. Second, Google ranks your site based on what it crawls so the more it crawls the better your rankings will tend to be. Third in the same way that having
multiple versions of URLs after and HTTP to HTTPS migration can result in Link Dilution, it can dilute your Crawl Budget. So having two versions of your site live will cut your Crawl Budget in half and having four can turn 100 crawls per visit into 25 per, and that will impact you rankings proportionally.
Fixing For Your Post HTTPS Migration SEO Issues Despite how often we encounter e-commerce websites suffering from particularly acute forms of all three
issues post HTTP to HTTPS migration, the tactics we employ to clean up the mistakes that caused them are all on the technical side—which transplanted from SEO guy Greek means they’re all relatively easy to implement.
Deploy Canonical Tags Aimed at One HTTPS URL
Validate One HTTPS URL in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
Use 301 Redirects to Aim Your Old HTTP URLs at your new HTTPS URLs
Update Your Website’s Robots.txt File and XML Sitemap with your new HTTPS URLs
Point External Links from Social Profiles and Local/Map Listings at Your HTTPS URLs
Deploy Canonical Tags Aimed at One HTTPS URL
Canonicalization may sound like it’s a training course for handling especially large projectile weapons, but it’s actually a pretty important aspect of organic search engine optimization. Getting canonicalization right will mean that Google will crawl more pages on your website; it will consolidate PageRank and Link Authority and PageRank, which will give your site a stronger backlink profile. It will also mean fewer broken links from other websites. Getting canonicalization wrong (in the way Ricoh did in the image above) will mean the exact opposite.
Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Validation
It may seem like I’m needlessly repeating myself here, but it is very important to understand that
http://site.com, http://www.site.com, https://site.com and https://www.site.com are really FOUR different websites. So you’ll need to ensure that the HTTPS version of your website gets added to
both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. And that in Google Search Console, you add both the www and non-www versions. Then make one of the HTTPS versions your preferred domain.
301 Redirect Your HTTP URLs to Your New HTTPS
Many of the issues we’re seeing post HTTP to HTTPS migration boil down to do with redirects. And that’s because the change can be done at the registrar level, in
the server config, or even in a .htaccess file; all of which have their own pitfalls. For instance, Apache servers use 302 redirects by default. Unfortunately, a 302 signals
the kind of “temporary” redirect you might use on your site for an out of stock product. But a site migration requires a 301 “permanently moved” redirect. So as
you go through and do your redirects, you’ll want to be sure to check subpages, as well as the home page;
depending on how your site’s rules are written and where they are placed, these can affect the redirects differently. You’ll want to take a look at your URL’s status
codes and hops, not just whether or not they land on the correct page to be sure things are working correctly.
Customer Name / 26
Update Your Robots.txt File and XML Sitemap
I’ll start by defining my terms here. First, robots.txt files are used by websites to
communicate with web spiders, to tell robots which areas of your website shouldn’t be indexed or displayed in search results—for
instance, the URLs where you login to its backend. They also typically contain a link to the location of your XML sitemap. So second,
an XML sitemap is a document submitted to search engines that gives spiders a map of
your URLs, images and videos. So obviously when migrate to a secure site you’ll want to make sure that you update
both and re-submit your sitemap via Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Point External Links at Your HTTPS URLs
Finally, you might that because your site is 301 redirecting your old non-secure URLs to your new, search-friendly, secure URLs but that’s a less than ideal situation in one instance … Your Back Links. You’ll recall that each back link pointed at your website is worth a certain number of points toward your search rankings. Well, when you use a 301 redirect you lose 15% of those points. So even though you can never change them all, it’s worth your time to change the links back to your site that you control, your branded social profiles and local search listings, manually.
“The best place to hide a dead body is page 3 of Google search results.� - Unknown
Questions & Answers
Dirk Lester ¡ SEO Consultant ¡ Dunn Solutions dlester@dunnsolutions.com