CMS/Upgrades - Change of protocol from https: to http: to address Google indexing problem

CMS websites have changed protocol (from https: to http:)

Imperial College’s Portal CMS websites have moved from secure https: to open http: pages.  It had always been the intention of the college to move to http: because this offers some performance and cost advantages over https:

This intention was accelerated by the results of the investigations which followed the April upgrade to Oracle Portal CMS Release 10G. We discovered that external search engines were no longer indexing CMS pages and that this was due to changes, in that release, to the way that ORACLE Portal handles https: pages. Once identified, the move to http: was given a very high priority and implemented immediately.

Please note that the signing on process is still secure and encrypted to protect access to pages for which permissions have been set.

We have changed all existing links on your pages which go to other CMS pages, to use the http: protocol. The https: version of a URL will continue to work, so if your site visitors have stored Favorites, they can still use them.

Google indexing issue resolved - (other external search engines too)

Following the change to http: Google is again indexing Imperial College websites stored in Oracle Portal CMS.  Whilst the full indexing may take up to a month, a significant amount of content is now in Google and searchable.

We have also improved certain technical aspects of the web pages which should improve the ranking of pages in Google. We will continue to look for further opportunities to improve ranking.