SEO and https pages

[inertia]

I am about to start the SEO work on a clients new site but the site has been built in a CMS systems and is hosted entirely on a secure server. The company are unwilling to change this setup.

This is an issue which i haven't come across before so i am unsure if this is going to cause any problems with regards to SEO.

Do search engines still index and rank appropriately pages which are https?

[PunkyLZ]

Yes from my experience the search engines do index and rank the pages that are HTTPS the same on all 3 of the major search engines.

[inertia]

Another question which relates to this. Will Google analytics work on a https page?

[alhefner]

The "https" is just the encrypted version of things. The same content can be sent and received and the search engines do not seem to have a problem with it. Your analytics should work just fine.

Not sure why your client insists on using the secure server for an entire site unless it is some sort of financial type of site or is only for internal comapny use and contains proprietary information.

[arthurakay]

http VS https should have no effect on analytics or SEO.

the only things that will effect search engine indexing are:
- pages disallowed in robots.txt
- pages with 'noindex' meta tag
- pages with external links of 'nofollow'
- pages behind a secure login

So, hypothetically... if your HTTPS pages are behind a secure login, the spiders won't be able to get to them.

[Dubbya]

The new Google Analytics code was implemented to accommodate ecommerce sites, so it's smart enough to change between secure and non-secure browser sessions automatically, as long as the pages are accessible and, as arthurakay stated, not secured by a login.

As arthurakay said as well, just use your robots.txt file to disallow any pages you don't want indexed and you'll be good to go.

[inertia]

cheers people

[SemAdvance]

You can also allow Google to index any pages behind https via Webmaster Tools as well.

Submit a sitemap when you start the SEO and monitor indexing.

Be sure to buid links to the individual pages as well.

Peace

[davidweb]

Https pages might be treated as http pages, but still I never spotted any https pages on top of search results ( especially for competitive keywords)

In case somebody has information on that, I would greatly appreciate it.