Query related to redirect from HTTP to HTTPS?

I migrated one of my website from old domain to new domain few months ago. Now I want to secure the website and want to migrate from HTTP to HTTPS.

Is it ok to have chain redirection? Does it affect the rankings of the website?

I don’t know the direct answer to your question. However, everything is moving to https, and Google is favoring https. So if you need to switch to https, might as well do it now. There probably won’t be a better time to do so.

1 Like

If you’re still redirecting visitors from the old domain to the new one, I’m assuming you still own the old domain. If you just switch the redirect at the registrar level to head to https instead of http, there won’t be any chain redirect involved.

I’m not quite sure why you’d consider not doing it this way. Besides, any domain name switch you made months ago will have been already indexed by the search engines, so it seems like something of a non-issue.

As for the switch from http to https, it won’t negatively affect search rankings since it’s just a security feature upgrade that the search engines deal with all the time. For that matter, it’ll likely improve you SEO situation given that the more reputable, reliable and well-maintained sites are all switching to https.

1 Like

Thanks for the suggestions - really helpful for the clarification…:blush:

What Are Redirect Chains? How Do They Impact SEO?

A redirect chain occurs when there is more than one redirect between the initial URL and the destination URL. When a URL is redirected, it should have a single 301 redirect in place. Most redirect chains happen inadvertently for one of two reasons:

Reason #1: Redirect chains are built over time. URL A is redirected to URL B, then a year later URL B is redirected to URL C.

Reason #2: A combination of HTTPS vs. HTTP, www vs. non-www and trailing slash vs. non-trailing slash redirects results in site-wide redirect issues. Commonly done during website migrations or relaunches where redirects are built in series instead of in parallel.

Why are Redirect Chains a problem?

Conventional wisdom has been that 301 redirects only pass about 85% of link equity. So if you have a backlink pointing to URL A, and you redirect URL A to URL B, URL B only gets about 85% of the value of the backlink. Unfortunately, that’s unavoidable.

If you have redirect chains, the conventional wisdom is that the loss in link equity is compounded. If there are two redirects in place, that becomes 85% of 85%, or roughly 72%. The more redirects there are, the worse it gets. The SEO team at Wayfair saw the real impact of this earlier this year when they correlated traffic drops with dates when additional redirects were added.

Unnecessary redirects also make it more difficult for Google to crawl the site, which can affect how well pages are indexed. Googlebot may give up if it encounters too many redirects. Multiple redirects can also result in marginally slower site speed which negatively impacts the user experience.