Handling Secure Server Problems

You may have pages on your site where users provide sensitive data, such as a credit card number or other type of account information. The Internet solution for protecting sensitive information is to put those web pages on a secure server. Technically, this means that the web page is on a secure port on the server, where all data is encrypted (converted into a form that cannot be understood except by knowing one or more secret decryption keys). You can tell when you’re looking at a web page on a secure server because http:// changes to https:// in the URL address.

Secure servers can cause duplicate content problems if a site has both a secure and non-secure version of a web page. Two versions of the same page end up competing against each other for search engine rankings, and the search engines pick which one to show in search results. Also, because people link to both versions of the page, neither page can rank well because they’ve split their link equity.