Switching from HTTP to HTTPS (6)

Hi guys
I have an old website which I want to switch from http to https, this website has some good backlinks which are pointing to the http address. What will happen once I switch my address to https? Will all my backlinks have no more effect on my website SEO wise?

Thanks a lot!

Hi whereisthemoney,

if you redirect from http to https via 301 redirect, a good percentage of the link juice will be transferred to the new address.
But the recommended way is to first set a canonical to the https address, and when google has indexed the https version completely, than do the redirect.

Hope that helps, gunnar

Thanks for you answer Gunnar! can you please explain to me what does it mean "to set a canonical to the https address"? I'm no expert in the SEO field

sure, just include

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.domain.com/site.htm"/>

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.domain.com<?php echo $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];?>">

I didn't do this myself on my websites but paid someone to do it. The plugins he used were these two plugins, if that helps.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/ssl-in...content-fixer/

https://wordpress.org/plugins/really-simple-ssl/

If you use something like SEMrush site audit or ScreamingFrog, it will tell you of any errors when you are migrating over.

If you are running wordpress, WpEngine.com will do this for you automatically and I have found that their hosting service is extremely reliable.

Additionally, they make it really easy to write redirects in the .htaccess file using regex so you don't have to add more plugins to your site.

Also, ensure you add the https and http version of your site in Google Web Master Tools and over time you should see the links shift from http to https.