Moving my blog to HTTPS, now have duplicate content

Given the recent news about google prioritising HTTPS and the minimal cost, I thought I’d move my blog over to HTTPS yesterday.

Admittedly it’s very early but can anyone tell me if I’ve missed a step here because I’m seeing duplicate content on google: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ar.je&oq=site%3Ar.je&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i58.3607j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

some pages are listed on HTTPS only, some are listed on HTTP only but worryingly some are listed on both. Clearly that’s going to cause issues.

Here’s what I did:

-Set up HTTPS and made sure it was working correctly
-301 Redirected all non-HTTPS traffic to HTTPS
-Added set up HTTPS version of the website in webmaster tools
-Submitted sitemap with all HTTPS URLs

Do I just need to wait and let google sort itself out or have I missed something important? I wondered if I should de-index the non-HTTPS pages using webmaster tools but wasn’t really sure what affect that would have.

My guess is that you’re wasting your time. Google aren’t going to penalise your blog in any way because it doesn’t have HTTPS encryption. HTTPS is a very minor signal in ranking search results, and if they use it at all, they will only do so for sites that involve sensitive or personal information being transmitted.

This is no criticism of your blog, but it won’t make a scrap of difference to your visitors if your content is encrypted - and Google knows that.

Mike

While that is the case for now, it’s unlikely to be the case moving forward over the next couple of years, it’s easier to sort it now than wait until it does make a bigger difference.

It’s true that Google said " … over time, we may decide to strengthen [the prioritising of HTTPS], because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web." And you’re right that it’s easier to sort out now.

But, realistically, is it likely that the vast majority of site owners will take any notice of it? Will the millions of bloggers and small businesses and part-time website designers even know about this? And how many will have a clue as to how to go about it?

And, if that’s right, would Google jeopardise the quality and relevance of their search results (which is, ultimately, what their empire is based on) by skewing them in a way that is, frankly, not relevant to most searchers?

Sorry, this is getting off-topic. Perhaps we should be having this discussion in the other current thread on this subject. But you were asking what effect the move to HTTPS would have on duplicate content. I was simply giving the opinion that you might be better off staying with HTTP.

Mike

To be fair, I’m only moving my personal blog as an experiment before I start messing with client sites that do have shops/login areas that rank well currently for product pages on HTTP.

I’ll give it a few days and see how google handles it after a few re-crawls.

Considering how competitive some search terms are, even if HTTPS works like page speed and has a tiny impact, those tiny impacts could easily be the difference between a #3 rank for a term and a #7 rank on competitive keywords, so it’s almost certainly doing things that only add a fraction of benefit because they add up.

I’d be very interested in hearing how you get on. I suspect you won’t notice any difference (at least, no difference that can be attributed to this particular change), but you might well prove me wrong.

Mike

I’ll let you know, my first step is seeing if moving the site from http to https has any negative impact due to duplicate content. As I’ve 301’d everything I hope not but we’ll see!

Your site is all okay and google wont penalize you for https, even ranking goes up.