Author: sumanah
Description:
Per http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-December/123135.html - "should the Uzbek Wikipedia be set up in a way that makes access via the HTTPS protocol the canonical one?"
Tim Starling asked http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-December/123142.html :
Is it enough to set the <link rel="canonical">, or is it also necessary to redirect?
Either way, the Squid cache would have to be purged, then the search engines would have to reread that site.
Answer http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-December/123148.html :
When I asked the nice folks at Google's search team, they answered me the following:
- The best answer would for them to use rel=canonical tags so that http://example.wikimedia.uz points to http*s*://example.wikimedia.uz. So I'd send them this page: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394 and tell them to start doing that. If they're very serious (and it's a small property, so there's not much risk) then they could make every http page 301 to the https version as well.
I don't know how much effort each of these two measures would be. If you'd ask me, I would suggest to be "very serious", but we are not under a deadline (the situation has been like this for more than a year now), and setting the rel="caonical" would already be really, really helpful.
Version: wmf-deployment
Severity: enhancement