HTTPS Settings and How They Affect SEO

[djbaxter]

We Analyzed the HTTPS Settings of 10,000 Domains and How It Affects Their SEO - Here's What We Learned
By Christoph Engelhardt, ahrefs.com Blog
17 Feb 2016

We recently analyzed the top 10,000 domains to answer one question: “How well do they use HTTPS to improve their SERP rankings?”

We looked at accessibility via HTTP and HTTPS. We looked at redirects. We looked at status codes.

1. Only 1 in 10 websites has what we consider a flawless HTTPS setup (More on that later).
2. A whooping 60% of the websites tested have no HTTPS whatsoever (increasing to over 65% when taking into account websites with errors in SSL setup).
3. Almost 1 in 4 domains were missing a canonical HTTPS version.
4. Almost 1 in 4 domains were using 302 (temporary) redirects instead of 301 (permanent) redirects.
5. Even Google can’t be bothered to use permanent redirects and uses temporary redirects (HTTP status code 302) instead. Then again, they won’t ever find it difficult to rank…

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