: Link to External Sites as HTTP or HTTPS? While migrating from HTTP to HTTPS, I am recreating all internal links and canonicals as HTTPS, but it is not clear what to do for external links.

@Berumen354

It's SEO best practice to link to external sites as https, if available. In practice, if they are handling their requests properly, an http should redirect to https anyway.

I don't really think it has much impact realistically though, and would use http when in doubt simply to avoid showing warnings to readers.

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@Goswami781

Link to http.

If you link to https and the target doesn't have an SSL certificate the user is going to get the Your connection is not private warning.

I can't speak for all sites, but any that I set up have the following in .htaccess to redirect http to https since I do have free LetsEncrypt certificates.

RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} =80
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule ^ %{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

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