http s

[clasione]

I have a customer that is requiring to be put on a secure server. I am preparing myself to set this up for the first time... Although I have gather some information on puting this job together, I am very interested in here what role this may play relating to crawlability and/or robot comprehension or effect.

Is there any issue known at this time that I should be aware of... Does the http:// differ in any way as compared to https:// ?

[Gevorg]

I belive google (or any other SE ) will not crawl https links.
So the answer is simple to your question.

Usually only small portion of the site requires https and those pages should not be accessible anyway without proper authentication.

Otherwise it does not make sence to protected it with https.

[bcombs]

Also, please realize that running pages through https makes them larger than http, which increases the load on both your server and your net connection.



Brian

[imaginemn]

The difference between the two is the encryption and the port they communicate through. HTTP (port 80), HTTPS (port 443). Although it may seem that HTTPS connections are much slower the problem here is that most of the encryption and validation is done on the client side so it takes longer for the request to be received on the server. The HTTPS connections do end up increasing during high volume but it usually takes at least 45 users to be connected to get the same speeds of regular HTTP. So it's safe to say high volume sites do not really see the lower performance. I used to have a few case studies on this topic. I'll try to find them and post them. Very useful information.

Google does index HTTPS sites. If you try allinurl: https you will get the following.

Results 1 - 10 of about 21,300,000 for allinurl: https

In the past they used to have the following statement in their submit guidelines.

google only indexes publicly available web pages. Secure sites (https: ) are not included in the google index.

That's no longer on their submission guidelines. But then again they also never included dynamic web sites either.

Hope this helps.

imaginemn

[clasione]

Everyones posts have helped tremendously with answering my question, and I thank everyone that has replied....

My next question is:

If I purchase my own secure certificate,

am I able to apply it to only one area of my hosting?

maybe a secure subfolder so I can use http on my main pages and then I'll get https only on a subfolder link /secure/mysecurepage.html

?

If not I'll setupp a completely different hosting account for the one secure page and the rest of the site I'll host elsewhere....

[Gevorg]

You applying certificate to the website.
Also please pay attention that certificate is valid for full website name.
If you bought it for www.mysite.com then IE ( or any other browser) will give a warning message if someone will try access https://mysite.com (notice no www)


There are more expensive versions of certificates that work with domain and any subdomain. (ie if it valid for mysite.com then it's valid for mydomain.mysite.com.

You then on server set the setting that this folder or file requires SSL.
Also all links to those pages or folders should be in format https://www.mysite.com/protectedpage.html

--------------------------
So the answer to your question is yes. You can (and i say should) protect only subfolder or pages that have customer information.

[clasione]

Thanks -

that's what I'm going to try and do......

Just protect a folder called /secure/
:wink: