: Least SEO-disruptive HTTPS migration strategy We are moving a website from HTTP to HTTPS and I have read Google's support article which is quite good: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033049
We are moving a website from HTTP to HTTPS and I have read Google's support article which is quite good:
support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033049
As I understand, 301 redirects may affect search engine ranking (at least temporarily), so I am considering a plan that could potentially achieve the migration while avoiding redirecting Googlebot, however I have had to make some assumptions which I would like to validate here.
The plan I came up with is:
Install the certificates and get the HTTPS version of the site working in parallel with the HTTP version
Update the canonical links on every page to the HTTPS equivalent. Also update the sitemap.
Sit back for a few days or weeks as I assume the next time Google crawls the site it is going to find the new canonical links and update its index to the HTTPS URL. <-- ASSUMPTION
Once Google's index contains only HTTPS URLs from the site, install 301 redirects from the HTTP pages to the HTTPS equivalents. This should have no impact on Google as the next time it crawls it will be crawling HTTPS links. <-- ASSUMPTION
What do you guys think? Are my assumptions right, and is this a reasonable approach?
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You should not do this exactly as you state, for a very simple reason:
You should view http and https are two different sites and in this case they'll have identical content, which means duplicated content. The canonical will partially prevent this, but it's not optimal. It's OK to wait a few days and perform your final https-migration-test by visitor usage, but don't wait too long.
The 301 redirect is a very common technique to migrate to https, I suggest you do this. I wouldn't be surprised (and this is speculation) that the smart people at Google have made their bot understand that "a lot a 301 redirects to the exact same content but https" means that you've installed https.
install certificate for the main domain and all subdomains
make site accessible with https, check all subdomain combinations
change all internal links in the whole codebase to https
check twice, whether all internal links are indeed https now, inclusive static assets like images, pdfs etc.
establish redirects 301 from http to https, better based on port (RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$ RewriteRule (.*) %{HTTP_HOST}/ [R=301,L])
check twice, whether all redirects are working
establish new search console property for https
update sitemap and upload it to the new search console
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