SSL Security And Social Share Counts

Tags

http, https, Secure Socket Layer, Shareholic, SSL

As those of you who are self-hosting your websites will probably know, beginning this month (July) with the release of Chrome 68, Google Chrome will start marking all HTTP sites as “not secure”:

Depending on your traffic, this may or may not be an issue. Still, many of you will upgrade your hosting with an additional security measure called a Security Socket Layer–or SSL. As the rather technical name suggests, what this does is make sure that the communication between your server and a visitor is secure. As far as web users are concerned, the only difference is that the prefix to their website address will now be HTTPS instead of HTTP, the extra S indicating this is now a Secure server.

Some hosts already provide this free of charge, while others will charge for the upgrade. But there is a snag: the moment you make the move to HTTPS, all your Share Counts for your content disappear! Social networks like Facebook and Pinterest think that your links/URLs have changed, which is why your older share count numbers are lost.

The good news is that Shareaholic can recover them for you with its proprietary Share Count Recovery technology with a click of a button, at least if you’re using the PRO edition. Even better, it doesn’t even matter if you were using Shareaholic before your move! Shareaholic claims its technology works for any website and can recover the lost counts at any time: