When I started my blog, I discovered that there were 2 active versions for the domain. If you used URLs like; http: //www .seojagaban.com or http: //seojagaban.com in the address bar, it would take you to my blog’s homepage. Cool right?

Interestingly again, in my bid to prevent Chrome from marking my site as ‘not secure’ and robbing me of the little traffic that I am yet to have, I got an SSL certificate for my website. This solved the security problem but also compounded the previous one. The domain versions moved up to 4. I now had URLs like; http: //www .seojagaban.com, http:// seojagaban.com, https:// www. seojagaban.com and https:// seojagaban.com.

Do you know the implication of this?

Implications of having different domain versions

Search engines rely on the number of links pointing to your site to determine how authoritative your site is. Definitely, no one will link their site to another site that is not of importance to them or does not contain any valuable information.

Google sees these versions as different URLs, hence, they are all given different ranks. For instance, if more websites link to ‘www. seojagaban.com’ than the rest, do you know what will happen?

Fairly, Google will divide this link equity between all the versions of your domain. At the end of the day, the equity meant for one is effectively shared among 2 or 4, depending on how GENEROUS you want to be.

You may be thinking that this is a single domain, with the same content. Yes, looking at it that way, they are the same, but technically, they are not. For instance, ;https’ is different from ‘http’ because one is secured and the other is not.

Do you dig me now? Good!


How can I redirect other domain versions to a particular one?

If you are serious with SEO, then you probably must take this issue seriously. There are different ways you can achieve this, depending on how proficient your programming skill is.

Some programmers can go to the .htaccess file and effect the change directly. Unfortunately, you may not be able to do that because that’s not your specialty.

Well, there are plugins you can use if your site is hosted on CMS like wordpress, wix, etc. I’m sure this sounds cool and easier for you, since a plugin can do the the work. All you just need to do is upload the plugin and let it do the work.

Plugins can fail, in fact, it does break some of the time. Peradventure if the plugin stopped working already and you are not aware, then you will be back to square one.

Personally, I don’t recommend using plugins, but if you still want to go ahead and use it, check redirect for wordpress.

Now, what is the alternative?

It’s simple, you can effect this stage directly in the cPanel account of your web host. Did you know? Thankfully, I am informing you now and I will walk you through the process.

Not only that, you can also use this method to redirect other pages within your site too.

You can watch this video to see the steps.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQMvPDSNVqM&feature=youtu.be

If you can’t watch it, follow the steps here: https://seojagaban.com/redirect-http-https-cpanel-guide/amp/



Conclusion

Finally, you’ve solved one of the problems behind poor SEO. I’m happy too! (winks). I successfully redirected http to https from cPanel.

I hope this was able to help you the redirection successfully? If you encountered any problem while doing this, please drop your message in the comment section and I will SWIFTLY reply you.

Pretty straight-forward write up, and concisely put too!

questechie:
Pretty straight-forward write up, and concisely put too!

Thanks