Scrutiny 12 Finding insecure links / content

Making secure

When scanning a secure (https) site

It has now become almost essential that web pages are secure. For SEO purposes, you may want to make sure that you have no links from your https:// pages back to the http:// version of your pages, and that your pages don't use resources (images or other linked files) which are insecure. This latter situation is known as 'mixed content'.

To bring these functions into play, make sure that your starting url is https:// and make sure that you have 'check images' and 'check linked css and js files' switched on in your site's settings

Also check 'Alert when links to http site are found' , now found in your settings > Finish actions.

You will want "Consider http:// and https:// versions of the same url to be the same" switched *off* and "Consider http:// pages to be external" switched *on*.

All of these settings are the defaults for new website configurations, so you should get the behaviour below 'for free' unless you change any of these settings.

At the end of the scan, if any issues are found, you'll be alerted and asked whether you want to go straight to a table of results to see the issues.

This table shows all issues together - secure pages which have a link to the old (http) version of the site, and pages which contain 'mixed content', ie use resources which have http urls.

If you have insecure content, you can also see the details of links to internal http pages from secure pages in the links tables by choosing 'http: links' from the Filter. And you can see pages with mixed content in the SEO results as before, Select 'mixed content' from the Filter drop-down button. If any pages contain links to insecure resources, they'll be listed.