When a site answers on both HTTP and HTTPS, Yandex will normally make the HTTPS address primary and show it in results. This page covers the opposite requirement: keeping HTTP as the address that ranks.
The two methods
- Block the HTTPS version from indexing with
Disallowin itsrobots.txt. - Redirect HTTPS pages to their HTTP counterparts, ensuring both versions remain reachable by the robot.
Read this before doing it
Yandex sets out its position in the same breath: HTTPS materially reduces the risk of credentials, passwords and card numbers being intercepted, and prevents content substitution — including advertising injected into pages in transit. It is the recommended protocol, and this page exists for the cases where a technical constraint makes it temporarily impossible, not as an equal alternative.
The legitimate cases
A certificate the target audience’s devices do not trust, hardware or embedded clients that cannot negotiate TLS, or a legacy application where mixed content cannot be resolved before a deadline. In each of those, keeping HTTP primary is a deliberate stopgap with a date attached.
The illegitimate case
Choosing HTTP because an HTTPS migration seemed to cost rankings. That reading is almost always wrong: what changed was the primary address, and the migration was incomplete — internal links still on HTTP, redirects pointing at the home page, robots.txt files that did not match. Reverting the protocol re-runs the same mirror change in the opposite direction and costs the same weeks again, without fixing anything.
If you do keep HTTP primary
Be consistent: one method, applied everywhere. A site that blocks HTTPS in robots.txt while also redirecting HTTP to HTTPS somewhere in its server configuration ends up with no reachable indexable version at all, which is a considerably worse outcome than either choice.
Biz bunu nasıl uyguluyoruz
We have only twice recommended keeping HTTP as the primary address, both times because of client hardware that could not negotiate modern TLS, and both times with a fixed end date. When a client asks for this after an HTTPS migration appeared to hurt them, we audit the migration first — every case so far has been an incomplete move rather than a protocol problem, and reverting would have cost another month for nothing.
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