Help, site traffic has dropped significantly since we changed from http to https
-
Heya, so I am just in charge of the content on the site, and the SEO content, not the actual back-end stuff.
A little under 2 weeks ago we switched to https, and our site traffic has been down a lot ever since. When I SERP check our keywords, they don't seem to have dropped in rankings pages.
Here is what I got when I asked our dev guy if 301 redirects were put in:
I did not add any redirects so all of the content is accessible on both unless individual links get hardcoded one way or the other. The only thing in place is a Cloudflare plugin which rewrites links in cached pages to match the way its accessed, so if for example you access a page over https you don’t get the version cached with a bunch of http links since that will throw up mixed content warnings in the browser. Other than that WP mostly generates all its links to match whatever protocol you are accessing the current page with. We can make specific pages redirect one way or the other in the future if we want to though...
As a startup, site traffic is a metric we track to gouge progress, and so I really need to get to the bottom of if it was the change from http to https that has causes the drop, and if so, what can we do about it?
Also, in case it is relevant: the bounce rate is now sky high (ave. 15% to 64% this last week!)
Any help is very welcome! Site: https://mobileday.com
Thank you!
-
Hi MobileDay! Did these answers help?
-
John gave you some fantastic answers.
He just told you exactly what you need to do a couple things I thought I could share with you.
When adding HTTPS this I found this reference invaluable
https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/the-zen-guide-to-https-configuration/
Then from checking out your existing 301's you are in need of a canonical that everything that is https or http redirects to a secular canonical URL. https://mobileday.com use https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/canonical/ you want the canonical to have the absolute link. Do a search and replace.
|
Like this
NOT
rel="canonical" href="//mobileday.com/" />
|
In order to be sure that you are redirecting properly use
https://varvy.com/tools/redirects/ to check your redirects
then sign up with a free account on
it will continually monitor your robots.txt, Canonicals redirects everything for free it's awesome. the tool displays redirects from www and non-www versions of a url using both http and https.
you definitely need to 301 your site to one canonical URLSEE a bigger photo below and available via the URL herehttp://i.imgur.com/mI7PM6s.png
www
No redirect
Final status code: 200
no www
No redirect
Final status code: 200
www (https)
1 Redirect
https://www.mobileday.com
** 301 redirect**
https://mobileday.com/Final status code: 200
no www (https)
No redirect
Final status code: 200
Here is a reference showing is fairly normal to lose ranking when you add HTTPS hopefully you did contact Google's search console your site should be added there a total of four times and you pick the canonical of the four sites
- http://www.mobileday.com
- http://mobileday.com
- https://mobileday.com <- this is where to point the other 3 urls
- https://www.mobileday.com
You will want to pick your chosen canonical which appears to be https://mobileday.com
Considering you're using cloudflare you can create rewrites as well as 301 redirects inside of the CDN/WAF using page rules
Please keep in mind that when you're setting up the HTTPS:// for the first time using a low time to live or server caching time with cloud flares (HSTS),
https://blog.cloudflare.com/enforce-web-policy-with-hypertext-strict-transport-security-hsts/
is going to keep you from making mistakes that cannot be reverted for whatever the remainder of the value is. Whenever you do set it up in cloud flare I recommend you set it for 24 hours see how it works use this to add your site to browsers https://hstspreload.appspot.com/
- https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168306-Is-there-a-tutorial-for-Page-Rules-
- https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pagerules-url-forwarding/
- https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pagerules-fine-grained-feature-co/
Rule Patterns
A pattern is the definition of what URLs a rule should act on. It can be as simple as a verbatim match, or complex with wildcards. For purposes of Page Rules' patterns a URL can be composed of:
<scheme>://<domain>:<port><path &="" query=""></path></port></domain></scheme>
remember to check everything before making the browsers forward to https automatically and do it for a short time first.
http://web-sniffer.net/
&
https://tools.deepcrawl.co.uk/fetch-as-deepcrawl/
Are great tools for this job so is screaming frog SEO Spider
http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
I sincerely hope I was of help,
Thomas
-
Hi MobileDay -
Well, sounds like you have some issues on your hands! Hopefully I can help sort it out.
First, get those redirects in place! There is no reason for users to be able to access it on both non-secure and secure. If you made the move to implement HTTPS, you want your users there as it helps with trust. Also, you're spreading your link equity. It looks like the search engines are ranking HTTPS, but that also means that the links going to any and all http pages are likely not being counted towards HTTPS. This is likely hurting your longtail traffic, which only you can see in Analytics.
Second, your canonicals are relative and not correct. It's rel="canonical" href="//mobileday.com/" />, which I am surprised to see since you are using Yoast SEO (so I guess you are on Wordpress). A quick way to help fix your duplicate content issues is to a) make those absolute and b) point them to where you want the crawlers to go (I suspect HTTPS).
A canonical is a band-aid though and the search engines do not always respect them. The right fix is a 301.
Also, more things to check:
- Are the URLs in your sitemaps HTTPS or HTTP? They should be the one you want to rank.
- You should declare where your sitemaps are in your robots.txt file (I don't see them here - http://mobileday.com/robots.txt or here - https://mobileday.com/robots.txt)
- I assume you have both HTTP and HTTPS verified in Search Console. Look at if your impressions have dropped on HTTP and see what is going on with HTTPS. This will tell you a lot.
- Regarding bounce rates, what else changed? I wonder if there is an issue with your HTTPS implementation and it's not working correctly on some mobile devices (or desktop browsers). Dig into your Analytics to see which platforms and browsers have a high bounce rate, and solve from there. You should also check to see if it's a specific page type that is bouncing a lot to see if there is an issue with that page type.
Good luck!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ecommerce site in Europe
A client is looking to expand their ecommerce business into Europe. They have already purchased a number of European brand domain names and want to start their expansion in Ireland. Is it better to have a single website with pages translated for each language or a seperate site for each domain/country? With Ireland the only obvious difference is the currency, language shouldn't be an issue. But if we choose seperate sites for each domain/country will having the same product content/descriptions especially in the case of Ireland be an issue? Thanks in advance
Web Design | | MartinJC0 -
Moving to new site. Should I take old blog posts with me?
Our company website has needed a complete overhaul for some time now and the new one is almost ready to go live. We also have a separate "news" site that is houses around 800 blog posts and news items. (That news site will be thrown away because it's on a completely different domain and causes confusion.) So we have a main site with about 100 decent blog posts and a separate news site with 800 poor posts. I plan on bringing all the main site blog posts over to the new site (both WordPress), but my question is whether or not to bring over the news site posts? All, handful, none? Another issue is the news site doesn't have Google Analytics, so I'm not sure if any posts actually generate traffic, but I can from the main site we do get some referrals from it. As far as quality of content goes, it's poor. Not sure who wrote it all, but it's mainly text press releases that aren't very interesting. Is it worth bringing over for SEO purposes or simply delete the site and create a mass redirect so all of those pages will direct to the new website's blog page? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | codyfrew0 -
Site Speed for Magento Site
We have our site all ready for test users but the site speed is painfully slow. Our developers are a bit stymied about what to do. Is anyone a site speed expert or know of anyone good that can evaluate our site and tell us what's going wrong? Thanks!
Web Design | | EcomLkwd1 -
Major home page change!
Hi Mozzers, Making a major homepage change on my site Orangeoctop.us. I am going from featuring content to featuring products, similar to how moz and hubspot feature their content on the homepage. Just to give you some numbers, the homepage only sees 2.6% of the total traffic and of that traffic half is direct. The homepage is going to be changed to OrangeOctop.us/guides. My Question: Is there anything that should be added to the homepage to ensure that I keep the same domain authority/page authority?
Web Design | | orangeoctop.us0 -
404 page in Windows IIS. HELP!
I run a real estate website.
Web Design | | Jeepster
My webmaster needs to create a 404 page for listings when they get deleted.
So far all he's come up with is 302-redirect to a standard "error template" page.
Can anyone suggest a 404 how-to guide I can show him?
Thanks0 -
301 forwarding during site migration problem - several url versions of the same page....
Hello, I'm migrating from an old site to a new site, and 301 forwarding many of the pages... My key problem is this I'm seeing www.website.com/ indexed in SE and www.website.com/default.aspx in showing as URL when I'm on homepage - should I simply 301 forward both of these? Then for several internal pages there are 2/3 versions of each page indexed. Canonicalization issues. Again, I'm wondering whether I should 301 forward each URL even if there are several different indexed URLs for the same page? Your advice will be welcome! Thanks in advance - Luke
Web Design | | McTaggart0 -
Getting a highly ranked site a better result for 1 search term
I have a highly ranked website for a niche category. My site ranks higher in SEOMOZ than all of my competitors, but I can't get any higher than 4th on a page for one specific search term. What can I do to help my site increase its ranking on a specific search term?
Web Design | | tadden0 -
Would iFrames From a Beta3 Help the SEO Value of Domain?
What I understand as of now: Google does crawl iframes, but attributes the SEO value of the content within them to their original site. (Let me know if I'm mistaken.) What I need to know: If I were to iframe a section of a beta3.domainname.com site into a domainname.com site, does this beta3 attribute any SEO value to the domainname.com site? Essentially - Does good content on a from a beta3.domainname.com (which is mainly just a naked piece of content) bring any benefit to the domainname.com version of the site when it is iframed into the domainname.com site?
Web Design | | SmokewagonKen0