Hello, I'm somewhat of a newbie here, but I'll try to keep my questions as intelligent as possible. I've tried searching through the forums for the last hour, and have been unable to find an existing answer to my question, so here goes... We've noticed unusually low search engine ranking for our site, given a PR of 4/5 (depending on the page) -- our site's page as also well optimized, including meta-tags, text keyword content, etc. I recently searched for our name (say, mhjcstores), where we rank number one. Our site is -- for example -- http://www.mhjcstores.com. The first result in Google, our site, comes back as https://www.mhjcstores.com, for which we have no backlinks or PR. Does this mean that Google considers our domain based on https:// ? Does anybody think this is having a negative effect on our standard, http:// link?
Hi mhjc, I'm kind of distracted by this: There are no links to that page (not even internal)? Having high PR doesn't necessarily mean you get high ranking. There are other seo factors to consider such as on page seo (as you mentioned), how often your search terms are searched for and competition for those terms etc. Not sure about the https bit, but I don't think it has an influence.
Yes, as far as I know, there are no links to that page, even internal -- there may have been once upon a time, when we started, in 2002. All of our links are relative now (and as such do not specify http:// or https://), but there may be a link or two out there on the 'net that links to the https:// page. I do understand that a high PR doesn't guarantee high placement -- but we are not even found in the top 10,000, for which we are highly relevant and linked -- but we are in the index. We aren't being punished, as we haven't purchased or performed anything resembling "blackhat" techniques. My final conclusion was that perhaps Google has us in as "https://", and that is somehow negatively affecting our search ranking. Thanks, mhjc
This search comes up with no results. Is this your site? If so then you need to build lots of links to the site to help your rankings. You should link to http://www.domain.com if this is the url you are using. use absolute links rather than relative links.
Links are definitely what is going to get you site ranked. On the topic of https vs. http, you should definitely be using the thhp only when you can. No only does the https create a duplicate page on your website, but it eats up your server compred to the http version of the same page. If you are using php, here is a script that will reditect users the the http version of the page. You can also specify per page if you want the page to be secure, like checkout pages... //every page goes to the http version if ($_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] == 443){ header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header ("Location: http://www.yoursite.com$PHP_SELF"); exit(); } //some pages can still be secure if($PHP_SELF != "/checkout.php"){ if ($_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] == 443){ header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header ("Location: http://www.yoursite.com$PHP_SELF"); exit(); } } PHP: