I've been using Paypal for quite some time now on a particular site. I've thought about making the site secure. If I get a secure certificate for my site, will this effect my search engine rankings? I know if I turned my pages from .html to .php it would, but I'm not for sure on http:// to https:// Thanks
You don't have to make the entire site secure. You are right in saying a https site is different to a http site though.
Yep not necessary for entire site but encryption is must if you have ecommerce site as such sites have highest intrusion rates so you must keep your session encrypted to send private information of your clients.
Thanks for the info. I will probably secure certain sections of the site. Now all I have to do is figure out how to do that.
https Is a secure port. I would I recommend only using it (Because it costs money) when important information is being moved about.
MSN has a problem with https, but the others can index them just fine. That won't make any difference
Taking my pages from .html to .php will make a difference. I started this particular site in 2004. The site has always had .html pages. If I changed it to .php then the ranking I have for bla_bla_bla.hml will be lossed unless I did a redirect.
checkout process where u handle people's profiles can go SSL, also accounts etc. it slows down website allot, not recommended to put it on index
I don't think it's that simple. If I made my entire site dynamic, I would probably go all out and do osCommerce or something. I'm not a coder. But from asking around and from what I do know, if I changed my pages dramaticly like I would want to, there is a high probablity that it would upset my rankings. I am ranking very well for nearly all my keywords. Nearly 100% of my traffic comes from organic search engine results. The rest is word of mouths. I don't want to take a gamble and possibly lose my rankings. That's why I'm leery to make any huge moves.
Then change your pages to php and use mod rewrite to have them keep the html extension. It will be transparent and the SE's won't even notice. .htaccess AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php .html .htm
Mod rewrites are like Chinese to me. Do you have a link to an easy to understand tutorial? Maybe it is something I should look into. Thanks
mod rewrite can get a little complicated. You might check out this for a beginner's guide. You might also start another thread asking for the syntax, there are plenty of members here that are more skilled in regular expressions than I am. Options +Indexes Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ $1.php [L] Add that to your .htaccess file....I think this is the way to do it.