Few Questions Re: SSL

[TravG]

I know this has been talked about here on the forum and I tried to read over most of it, but I have a few questions regarding SSL and moving from http to https. If someone has a few minutes and could answer a few questions I would appreciate it.

1. Since I do not store any personal info or any money info, do I really need SSL?

2. What happens to ranking? Do existing external links lose their effectiveness? If possible should external links be changed to point to https?

3. Do I need to re-point internal links where I use the entire URL? For example when an internal link uses http://www.abc.comxx to link back to my homepage.

4. Is there any other "must do's" when changing from http to https?

Thanks,

Travis

[dfiocch]

1. On "security purposes", if you don't store personal data or money info, you don't really need SSL.
On "usability purposes", yes. Soon ALL browsers will block your site(s) if not "ssled" (just check what Chrome and Firefox are developing).

2. Google stated many times that "SSL" will have (if not already has) a weight in ranking even if minimum. We are going to a "no-link-weight seo era" (links will not have any effect on ranking, according to Google). And yes, they have to be pointed to https.

3. Yes, you need. Otherwise you will get "warnings" from your browsers.

4. Nothing special, just a proper implementation and proper redirects. It's a pain in the axs...

[Strutt]

Another answer/opinion for you my friend....

1) You do need SSL to rank in Google properly now. Chrome started flagging non-SSL sites, as of July 1st 2018. Hence Google has already started deranking sites that do not have SSL. Unfortunately this Google algorithm shift has started killing off smaller sites, for whom SSL costs are too expensive, because they no longer rank on the 3-4 word ultra-targeted phrases. Google has started passing over that value to brands/big sites/sites with SSL now - smaller sites with no SSL have lost most of their value in 2018 due to algorithm shifts from Google.

It's one of the reasons the bigger operators have decided to shaft smaller affiliates this year - basically lots of smaller affiliates relying on niche 3-4 longtail traffic have lost their organic search traffic due to Google preferring brands/SSL/sites with lots of traffic etc

2) It might be cheaper to organise a temporary solution for HTTP, however in the long run its clear you need to shift to HTTPS.

3) Yes repoint your links to your new SSL site. If you just leave them pointing to the HTTP site instead of HTTPS, you'll lose a load of traffic 'overnight'. It will be really expensive for you, if you leave all of your old internal links pointing to the old HTTP site instead of HTTPS.

4) If you can, redirect your most valuable 3rd party links from HTTP to HTTPS. Even if you redirect HTTP pages to HTTPS internally, you'll still lose most of the SEO value on that page unless you swap the external links over also.

Here's a couple of decent independent sources of information I'd recommend on the subject:
https://searchengineland.com/http-ht...website-246940
https://moz.com/community/q/change-c...-http-to-https
Both of these sites are top drawer for independent information on SEO, and you can probably find much better subject-specific articles on those sites

Good luck with your website overhaul best of luck with it!

[foneai242]

They also have bad and good effect both.

[turbobets]

Do I need separate certificates for www.sportsbookreviewsonline.com and sportsbookreviewsonline.com? And separate 301 redirects to https?

[Progger]

Do I need separate certificates for www.sportsbookreviewsonline.com and sportsbookreviewsonline.com? And separate 301 redirects to https?

No,u need only one certificate.And only one htacess to force ssl with or without www.

[xecutable]

Costs what costs luckymedia? Hosting competition is fierce most give you Free SSL.

Overall it's very easy to implement and track it in Google Webmasters and redirect the http to https.

Ive been using it over a year now. One thing to pay attention is what images and internal links you have and with what kind of URLs.

Any image with http url or internal link will flag the Entire page as non-secure but at the top you would see the resources listed, so that will help you to find them easily.

It is a ranking signal and has been since August 2014 : https://security.googleblog.com/2014...nal_6.html?m=1

a very lightweight one affecting less than 1% but that may have changed.

Again what SEO benefits? Stop linking articles from 2016 when 301 redirects passed only PARTIAL link juice: https://www.google.ch/amp/s/searchen...ore-254608/amp

So to sum up: do it, your cpanel probably already has a ssl option. Set it up in google webmaster and set a 301 redirect or you might just ask your host to set it up.

If using wordpress change the site link to https. And yah verify what you read here cause some of the stuff is old and misleading borderline harmful than beneficial.

[allaboutthebets]

If your using WordPress there are some good plugins like really simple SSL and velvet urls to change all the urls to the https version

[Progger]

A htaccess can drop some problems, when a addondomain exist with bad server config..

Example..

/root/user/public_html/Page files and a folder with the same name like the addondomain <---- this is bad
/root/user/folder with the same name like the addon Domain <----- this is good.

Why ?

SSL,must be forced with htaccess and would overwrite primary rules.
Exclude is possible,but not always.

Regards

[TravG]

So I did implement ssl on two of my smaller sites just to see what it is all about and to see how hard it is. It really isnt that difficult at all, changing over the internal links was the most time consuming thing.

Is there any thing I need to put in my htaccess other than to force non-www over to www?

Also before implementing this on my main money generating websites, its a little scary to me that external links need to be switched over to https or I will lose my rankings. No matter what there is going to be a time delay until links can get switched over and I guess you lose all the links that just naturally linked to your site. How did you guys that have already done this deal with that? Did you lose traffic for a while until the links to https caught up?

[Strider1973]

I don't think you lose much link juice when switching to SSL. I doubt it has measurable, as G! should automatically recognize this.

Changing internal links is pretty easy when you just use a search + replace plugin.

I've usually used this guide here when switching to SSL in order not to forget anything (like Analytics / Search Console changes when using that service): https://www.keycdn.com/blog/http-to-https/
(I was able to skip many of the steps as SSL certificates were pre-installed on cpanel).

[MMM]

Also before implementing this on my main money generating websites, its a little scary to me that external links need to be switched over to https or I will lose my rankings. No matter what there is going to be a time delay until links can get switched over and I guess you lose all the links that just naturally linked to your site. How did you guys that have already done this deal with that? Did you lose traffic for a while until the links to https caught up?

I've switched my site to https 2 weeks ago. Some links i contacted and asked to be updated. Many i haven't. However when i check the links to site (https site) on GWT i see almost all of them. So i would say that google is pretty fast on spotting them and i really doubt you loose much juice on that.

However, i did loose traffic on the change - but hard for me to say is it due to SSL switch, Google update or something else i did.

[baldidiot]

I've switched my site to https 2 weeks ago. Some links i contacted and asked to be updated. Many i haven't. However when i check the links to site (https site) on GWT i see almost all of them. So i would say that google is pretty fast on spotting them and i really doubt you loose much juice on that.

Google have said they don't treat http to https as a true redirect for links and that the full value passes over.

[xecutable]

With the latest Google core algo that hit on August 2nd, I'd delay the switch even though https is somewhat small ranking signal. Let the serps settle, this way at least you know for sure if it did anything, rather than that huge algo update that has made the serps dance for almost a month now.

When I switched a year ago on a different site made no difference. It's always better thought for chrome not to tag you as "DANGER: SITE NOT SECURE", regardless that you take 0 login credentials or any sensitive data.

[baldidiot]

Also... few of our hosts have been auto installing ssl certificates meaning they're accessible via https even though we hadn't set it up yet.

Because google has a preference for https over http if google spots a https version of the site it show that in the SERPs, not the http version. This happened to us on a site and we quickly set up the 301s to the https version.

Not sure what would have happened if we hadn't (ie: would google have passed all authority over even without the redirect?) but the rankings were identical even without the 301 in place (although like I say, we quickly did it so can't comment on the longer term implications).

[TravG]

What exactly did you 301? All the pages or just the entire site as a whole?

Also... few of our hosts have been auto installing ssl certificates meaning they're accessible via https even though we hadn't set it up yet.

Because google has a preference for https over http if google spots a https version of the site it show that in the SERPs, not the http version. This happened to us on a site and we quickly set up the 301s to the https version.

Not sure what would have happened if we hadn't (ie: would google have passed all authority over even without the redirect?) but the rankings were identical even without the 301 in place (although like I say, we quickly did it so can't comment on the longer term implications).

[baldidiot]

What exactly did you 301? All the pages or just the entire site as a whole?

Whole site, just http to https.

[TravG]

Gotcha - Thanks!

[allfreechips]

Also clouflare does a great job with CDN support and SSL certs for free, I use them on a lot of sites.

[Cash Bonus]

Hi Travis, a lot of people use cloudfare. It's very good, reliable, flexible and not too expensive to use.

Cloudflare is also easy-to-use and provides a number of features, great security, and effective website optimisations, not to mention a very fast global network which reaches areas other CDNs often miss. As allfreechips has already mentioned, it also has CDN support and SSL certificates for free. That makes it a must to have for your performance boosting competitors.

https://www.techradar.com/uk/reviews/cloudflare