I am looking at a site with a Google page rank of 4 and the https pages on the site show no page rank on the toolbar. Non https pages are ranked 3 etc. Wonder why this is?, does Google rank https pages or is it just not showing on the toolbar?

Or if already been covered please point me to the page as I couldn't find it.

Thanks

Different URIs. Google ought to be smart enough to realize http and https point to the same place, and the same with www.x.com and just x.com, but these are all treated separately. A more important point is that toolbar PR is pretty worthless, and kind of a waste of time to check.

What difference does it make whether https:// has PageRank or not, anyway? https:// is all about the security, which is a user thing, not a search engine thing.

Redirect from the http pages they know about to the secure ones.

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

What difference does it make whether https:// has PageRank or not, anyway? https:// is all about the security, which is a user thing, not a search engine thing.

The site I was looking at had all the main pages as https:// and they didn't seem to be doing that well in the search engines. They didn't need to be secure it was just the way it had been set up so I'm not sure if https affects ranking, any thoughts?

Are you sure the main page is set up as https? If you enter a secure page of a site and then click on a link that uses a relative URL the page will come back with the https

The main pages of the site could display as http, but you might also be able to see them as https depending on how you clicked through the site.

Regardless of search engines if the pages don't need to be secure they should use http instead of https. You'd really only need the security for pages where a login is required or where sensitive information like a credit card number is being transmitted. And those kind of pages don't benefit from being in search results.

Exactly, Steven. https:// pages are unnecessary unless sensitive information is being posted and therefore needs to be encrypted. They also increase server usage quite a bit (among other problems) and as a result aren't used very much.

Louise: if all of the site's main pages were in https:// form, the suggestion here is that someone built the site without full knowledge of what he/she was doing. This usually means that there are other issues besides just the https:// issue, and it's well within the realm of possibility to think that at least some of these issues are creating search engine ranking problems as well.

Now what those issues are, I couldn't tell you...I haven't seen the site in question, and there are far too many to speculate on. Maybe if you showed us the link we could guess at it.

I'll second Adam's suggestion for a link. If we could see the site in question we could probably offer more suggestions as to what's going on.

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

What difference does it make whether https:// has PageRank or not, anyway? https:// is all about the security, which is a user thing, not a search engine thing.

Thats wrong, http and https does hot have to be pointing to the same server, completely different content can be served from https as to http. remember that its running under a different port, so it is likely there are two daemons running.

https ensures that data transmission is encrypted on transit. Public facing https pages can contain a lot of useful information. https is used a lot to protect session id's when being transmitted.

A lot of e-commerce site apply https to everything to ensure that there are no chances of person data being sent in plain text.

There is no reason why the toolbar should not show the page rank of https pages, however of course it doesn't. I reckon it does this for one or more of three reasons:

1. The browser does not allow data to be transfer to domains that are not covered by the current certificate. or

2. Google thinks that the load of decrypting the page is high, therefore it does not grab the page rank data to reduce cpu load.

3. Google does not wish to share the data for some private reason.

It's important to note that https pages rank just as well as http pages. just make sure that you don't have duplicate data so 301 redirect the pages correctly https or http not both.