After reading that Google will give a ranking boost to the sites using HTTPS, many website owners implemented this. But instead of getting any benefits, they experienced losses. Their efforts to include HTTPS in their SEO strategy failed miserably leaving them in confusion.
Gary Illyes from Google said that around 34 percent of the Google search results are HTTPS, which reflects that more sites are now secure to visit. He further added that more and more sites have switched to HTTPS by they are losing out due to faulty implementation of the strategy. The mistakes in migration have caused more SEO issues like proper site version, duplicate content, link dilution etc.
Duplicate Content
This problem arises due to two versions of the live site. If the site owners don’t leverage the canonical tags, Google sees two versions of the live site and categorize them as duplicate content.
Further, there are some sites which don’t get desired results even after leveraging the canonical tags. It is basically due to incorrect use of tags.
Link Dilution
Link dilution is another SEO issue caused by the improper implementation of HTTPS version. If both the versions are live along with canonical tags, you can face link dilution problem. The chances of users coming across both the versions and sharing to them respectively increase, which causes splitting of the external link into two URLs instead of one.
Waste of Search Engine Crawl Budget
Making both the versions live and that too without leveraging the canonical tags, increases chances of search engines crawling both that is a complete wastage of crawl budget. This is equally problematic for search engines as well as the website as the search engines don’t know the preferred version and waste time and budget on crawling both HTTP and HTTPS versions.
Solution:
The ideal technique to address the issue and ensure right implementation of HTTPS is to have the HTTP version URLs 301 redirect to the HTTPS versions. This helps you avoid all the problems of link dilution, content duplication, and double crawling.
Just make sure you don’t use 302-redirect as these are the temporary redirect. Here are some other practices to ensure correct implementation of HTTPS setup.
• Add the new version in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools with both the www and non-www versions.
• Make sure all the internal links point to the HTTPS version URLs on a complete website.
• Point the canonical tags to the HTTPS URL versions.
• Include HTTPS URL versions in XML sitemap.
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