One https address

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What we check

Your site can be typed several ways: with or without www, with http:// or https://. We check that they all end up at one secure address. Specifically: http:// redirects to https://; www and the bare domain lead to the same host within two redirects; and the home page takes no more than two redirects to reach.

All good scores 1. One problem scores 0.5, two or more 0.25. If the home page ends up on plain http://, the score is 0. If the other form of the address (www or bare) doesn’t exist at all, that’s fine; if it exists and fails, that’s a problem.

Why it matters

Each version of an address that answers separately looks, to a crawler, like a different site. The links and attention your site earns get split between them, and an assistant may cite whichever one it found first.

Long redirect chains cost time and requests, and impatient fetchers give up partway. A site still on plain http looks neglected and is treated as less trustworthy.

How to pass

1. Pick one address, for example https://example.com.
2. Redirect every other form to it in a single hop, with a permanent (301) redirect: http://example.com, http://www.example.com, and https://www.example.com.
3. On nginx, that looks like this:

   server {
       listen 80;
       listen 443 ssl;
       server_name www.example.com;
       return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;
   }
   
   server {
       listen 80;
       server_name example.com;
       return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;
   }

4. On a hosted platform, set the primary domain in its domain settings and turn on “force https”.

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