Changing HTTP to HTTPS in citations

[Dana Franks]

We have clients who have many citations that have URLs starting with HTTP but they have now upgraded to HTTPS. The redirections work correctly and the links go to the correct site with no problems. Does this affect rankings? Do all of the citations need to be changed to HTTPS as well, or is it okay to leave them as-is if the rest of the info is 100%?

 

[whitespark]

Ack! Definitely do not waste any time or money updating the citations for this. If the redirects are in place, you're all good.

 

[Dana Franks]

Awesome, that's exactly what I wanted to hear and I trust y'all. Thanks!

 

[whitespark]

Hey @Dana Franks. The astute and ever watchful Lisa Kolb brought something up to me about this that is worth considering. If you don't update the URL on the sites, then because of the redirect, referral traffic in Google Analytics will disappear and it will look like the traffic is direct traffic. You'll lose your referral data. So if the client has a handful of sites that are important and showing referrals in Google Analytics, then you might want to update the URLs on those specific ones. Sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, industry specific sites come to mind. Maybe Bing too.

Hope this is helpful!

 

[ABuck]

Thanks Darren!

 

[Thompsonpaul]

@Dana Franks and @whitespark - referrals will be passed correctly through an HTTP to HTTPS redirect without issue. It's the reverse where the referer gets stripped - i.e. going from an HTTPS to HTTP.

 

[Rich Owings]

@Thompsonpaul So let's say someone is on https://citationsite.com and they click a link to http://clientsite.com which then redirects to https://clientsite.com. Will the referrer get passed on, or will it get dropped since the initial click is from HTTPS to HTTP?