Site: Showing Pages with Https: and Http:

Pages Are not Listed In Google

[F_Rose]

We have added multiple new sections in our site, the past few months.
We have not seen these pages indexed in Google.
I did a site: search on Google and was amazed to see that our new pages are listed with http: and https: (both versions)

We use the https: version, once users go into our shopping cart (secure part of our site) to complete thier order. (we have an ecommerce site).

Being that our site is set up using relevant links and not absolute, once a user goes back from the shopping cart to the main site the url will begin with https:// instead of the [....]

We have blocked the bots from indexing the https through robots.txt, but that does not seem to help. (Perhaps the reason to this is: because we have blocked it, after we noticed Google is indexing these pages. I guess once they have entered our secure part of the site we can't get rid of the bots, they keep on coming back.)

We are considering a sub domain for our shopping cart and blocking the sub domain in robots.txt and hopefully this will solve the issue. (please correct me if I am wrong)

Being that Google has many https pages indexed from our site, what would you suggest me to do with the https pages. If we drop it, an error page will come up for all these pages, is it OK with Google to have so many error pages?

Or perhaps, we should consider a different solution to address this issue?

Please advise..

[tedster]

There's been a lot of discussion here in the past year or two about this http/https form of duplicate url - you can find many of those threads through site search.

Best practice is to set up the secure certificate on a subdomain such as secure.example.com - that avoids the problem completely. But if you've already got the problem, here's a thread that addresses ways to fix it:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[jdMorgan]

Alternatively, switch the 'return from shopping' links to absolute links.

Then add some mod_rewrite or ISAPI Rewrite code that does the following:

If HTTP request and shopping-cart-section URL
Redirect to requested URL-path, but using HTTPS

If HTTPS request and NOT shopping-cart-section URL
Redirect to requested URL-path, but using HTTP

Wherever you make a transition from HTTP to HTTPS or from HTTPS to HTTP, use an absolute (canonical) URL. That combined with the redirects above will both stop future problems and help fix the current ones.

Jim

[edited by: tedster at 10:40 pm (utc) on Oct. 16, 2007]
[edit reason] clarify formatting [/edit]

[F_Rose]

Thanks for your great advice..

We have new pages that we created and are not showing up in Google's index.

They do come up when I do a site: search some as http and some as https

Thier is no way you can access these pages from our secure part (https) of our site..

The only way they can get a hold of these pages is through having indexed an existing regular (http) page as (https)way back and are following the links now with the https.

I don't know what solution would drop all https pages from Google.

The fact that they have indexed htpps pages all along we have our site seem to make the problem very complicated..

Please let me know what my next step would be..

Thanks

[jdMorgan]

The method outlined above should fix your problem. It has been used successfully on several sites.

Jim