Problem
You have a web site all with SSL. There is a reverse proxy or load balancer that acts as SSL termination point. Behind that reverse proxy you have an Apache web server running plain http.
Your application uses 302 redirects to announce new URLs or whatever the reason is for doing so. Since the web server does not know that https URLs should be announced, the response header is wrong and looks like following:
Location
http://www.example.com/your-fancy-url
The browser interprets that location header and send a request to this non-SSL URL instead of https:///www.example.com/your-fancy-url
If your reverse proxy does not know how to handle this, a connection will time-out. How to circumvent this if you have access to the web server but not to the reverse proxy or load balancer? What to do if your load balancer (such as Blue Coat devices) are closed down appliances that are not able to rewrite response headers?
Search engines do obviously not know the answer or I simply did not asked the right question.
Solution
Since Apache version 2.2.4 mod_headers is able to rewrite response headers. Just add the following to your httpd.conf
Header edit Location ^http://(.*)$ https://$1
This configuration statement will solve your problem. Redirects triggered by your back end web servers will be re-rewritten to comply with your SSL terminating reverse proxy/load balancer.
Further reading: mod_headers
Have fun….