SEO, http and https problem

[subtleinstrument]

I've recently discovered our Google ranking is even worse than in was before we got into SEO.

I think the problem is that we have both HTTP and HTTPS pages. The HTTP pages were supposed to be what the search engines would see, while people navigating it would go to the top page and then navigating through links to HTTPS.

However, the HTTP pages, which is what the search engines should see, are full of links to products and categories which are HTTPS addresses. Therefore, I believe that the search engines visit the HTTP pages, see that there are only HTTPS links, which they can't visit, and give it a dismal page rank.

The short version of the question is that I want to make it so that the shopping cart doesn't provide HTTPS pages unless the user is checking out with his/her purchases. Both human and search engine visitors should see only HTTP addresses. How do I do this?

Thanks in advance. I'm running OSCMax 2.0

[michael_s]

That is how it works by defaut. SSL is only available to the checkout process and nowhere else.

If that is not how it is working for you, then you have some other problem on your server.

[subtleinstrument]

I figured out what was wrong. In the two configure.php files, a bunch of settings which should have been defined as 'http://www.mydomain.com' were instead set to 'https://www.mydomain.com' Thus, it kept going back to secure pages, with the attendant SE results problems.

Once I set those back to "http", the site worked properly, and hopefully in a few weeks Google will give us better results. Thanks for the help.

[minuteman1970]

I am having the same exact problem. I chose "secured install" when installing OSc, as I would like to offer my customers a secure shopping experience. If I change it back to non-secure, will the payment portion still be protected by SSL?
thanks.