https SEO Questions

[imbckagn]

I did a quick search but didn't find any recent topics. I am assuming Google treats https pages the same as http pages as long as there is no secure login area.

I want to confirm that I'm correct and if you have any experience with this please let me know. I don't recall seeing any https pages ranking in the top 5 or even 10 for competitive phrases.

I am going to SEO a https page for a very competitive keyword phrase and just want to make sure I'm not wasting my time. I know someone will as so yes the page must be https.

Thanks

[tedster]

Yes, public https pages can definitely be indexed and rank. The Adwords "keyword tool" page is one example, just off the top of my head. In fact, there are many posts here where people complain about seeing the https versions of their urls in the search results when they don't want that.

However, there are also many webmaster experiences that indicate all-https sites do not see their pages crawled as deeply or frequently. When they switch to http protocol they see an increase. So, I assume the slower server response would be a significant factor in lowering the crawl budget.

Using https would not be my first choice in competing on a major keyword, but it's not impossible -- just harder.

You'll really want to nail the technical details on the server side. For example, using data compression can make a big difference for crawl depth and frequency, but combining the https protocol with gzip can be a problem in some cases. Also, make sure that the server responds correctly to If-modified-since in the request headers - a 304 status is a lot quicker to send than a full but unchanged page, and that saves googlebot a lot of crawl budget for your website.

[imbckagn]

Thanks tedster. I have my website hosted on a normal server and I will be hosting a subdomain on the SSL server. It's just going to be one page so it sounds like I will be OK.