Backlinks to target https or http site?

Hello, looking for advice on https and backlinks. Used search here and on the web and could not find a definitive answer. We have another site that we added an SSL to, Google combined the backlinks together for http and https versions of the site in WMT. Ahrefs or Moz (can't remember) only showed the http domain with a few links and all went to the https version even though we didn't move any previous backlinks.

Situation: Adding an SSL to another established e-com site with backlinks. The https site will not have any backlinks since it is new. The http and https versions of the site are both publicly accessible.

I have two questions.

1. Is it best to redirect the http homepage to the https version and keep visitors on the https version throughout their visit?

2. When creating backlinks, should the links target the https or http version? Does it matter either way?

Thank you for helping.

1. You should redirect the http otherwise it would be seen as duplicate content. If you don't want to redirect you should use canonical URLs.

2. It matters if you don't do the redirect then you should target https, and doesn't matter if you redirect http to https.

Redirect the http to the https and build links to the https

Excellent! Thanks for helping.

Go with http not on https.

Definitely go with the first answers you got. Do the redirect and then you can build to either.

asap1 said:

Redirect the http to the https and build links to the https

Click to expand...

I think so, Its better.

Edit. Ignore me it's an ecom site.

Do as others suggest above.

I thought you were doing it for SEO reasosn

It would be good if you first redirect the http request to https port and then build up the links for secure port.

From a domain authority ranking perspective, I assume Google gives link equity from both sites to the root domain. Is that accurate?

If that's accurate, then biggest problems (with the redirect) are the http deeplinks because each page would have to be redirected and to the https equivalent page and that's many, many pages.

Thanks everyone for the input.