: Issue with redirecting an HTTP homepage to an HTTPS homepage In July, we changed our homepage to HTTPS via a 301 redirect from HTTP (the only page on our site with HTTPS). Even though we

@Eichhorn148

HTTP vs HTTPS is a canonicalization issue. You should choose either secure or insecure and make it the canonical version. It sounds like you tried to do so with your home page and 301 redirects. In this case, I would suggest that you use a rel=canonical meta tag instead.

You also need to pay attention to how your site is linking to itself. If somebody visits the secure home page, make sure that they stay on the secure version of your site as they click around. Similarly, users without encryption should be able to click around without it unless they get to a portion of your site that would require it (such as checkout).

There is nothing inherently wrong with allowing Googlebot to crawl both your HTTP and HTTPS sites. That is a common scenario and Googlebot is well equipped to handle it. You may certainly register both versions in webmaster tools. I would only submit a sitemap for the one that you consider the canonical.

It also sounds like you expected the combined weight of the links into both versions of your page to boost your rankings once the two were combined. In my experience this doesn't happen. Possibly because your site was already getting the benefit from all those links because Google was already treating the HTTP and HTTPS pages as a single entity in terms of Pagerank.

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