HTTPS sitewide move has resulted in huge rankings drop...
-
Hi all,
An e-commerce site has recently moved protocol to https sitewide.
The site ranked page one for some great terms and now appear to be page 2 or below. Brand terms seem unphased and are still very strong, on both Google and Bing.
The following has been done;
- Everything 301'd from http to https
- Sitemap Edited
- Updated Webmaster Tools
- Robots.txt edited
- Crawled and Fetched all pages daily.
- Checked Paged are all follow,index.
- PPC Ads mass updated to new url's.
Most terms were ranked 1 - 9 on Bing, and Page 1/2 on Google.
HTTPS upgrade was done less than one week ago. The site is not payday loan related, nor was it hit by latest panda escapades. Everything on the site is relevant to the content.
Has anybody else been in this position, what else can be done?
I'd appreciate any help and advice. Thank You
-
Thanks very much for your feedback! It helps a lot.
-
It's very hard to pinpoint whether doing it had a positive affect. I'm going to say if it did, it was extremely minimal. It's 'nice' for site visitors to see the site is verified I guess.
I'd still do it again, as Google said it's worthwhile. Just a shame it's taken so long, and we couldn't measure success of failure.
I've done it on another site since, which was far smoother, rankings and traffic remained the same though.
-
Thanks for that! It helps me understand what the risks may be in doing this now. Am I wrong in deducing you had a long-term positive gain overall?
Thanks!
-
Hi,
It took roughly 4 months to fully recover.
The dent in the graph doesn't look that significant, but the spike towards Christmas is way into the 300,000 mark..
Paid traffic paid a valuable part in keeping traffic steady (as you can see).
Regards
Alex
-
Hiya,
I wondered if your site has recovered fully now and how long it took for it to do so?
Many thanks!
-
5 weeks on, and the site is still recovering.
Obviously during this time Google announced its preferred status to HTTPS sites too!
Only yesterday did we return top for the brand name,.
To put a figure on how much damage has been caused on this matter, organic traffic (Google only) was down 35%, and organic revenue (Google only) Y-O-Y last month was down 60%.
Would love to know the reasoning for the huge drop in rankings, and the recovery time period to expect.
-
This indicates to me that something is wrong besides waiting for a 301 redirect situation to be properly indexed / acknowledged. This is not currently a ranking factor, but there have even been murmurings of Googlers favouring HTTPS sites - it's certainly a plus to be on HTTPS URLs in Matt Cutts' opinion - http://www.seroundtable.com/google-ssl-ranking-18256.html
At the very least, the move should not hurt you, especially not for brand terms two weeks later.
Unfortunately I am really not sure what the problem is likely to be, assuming that everything about the redirection has been done by the book and you are not seeing any errors on that front. A continued drop might warrant a request for reconsideration, but that is a last-ditch effort in most cases.
-
One week on and brand terms have gone the exact same way. We're on page 2 for our brand, yet dominated page one with 5-6 links before this https move. With absolutely no glimmer of hope for our organic terms.
None of the keywords which were been worked on (and getting results with) are getting anywhere,
I know and understand it is a waiting game to get the rankings back, however it is painful to see the rankings in such a state.
Can anybody recommend further steps to give the site a boost?
This article from Rand fascinates me, and gives some potential light at the end of the tunnel for a quick fix! http://moz.com/rand/queries-clicks-influence-googles-results/
Thanks in advance
-
It will cause duplicated content, that is why you add the canonical tag that points to the https site. What you are doing is waiting for Google to react to your address change and covering your bases while you are waiting. Google is big, things like address changes don't happen overnight, they could take weeks to fully index correctly. Risking a little duplicate content to me is worth not having the traffic drop off of a site.
-
One week ago. Would that not cause duplicate content? I thought about doing it that way round, but was a little worried about duplicating the whole site. (In hindsight it couldn't have been any worse)
Thank you for your reply.
-
How long has it been since you switched? It might be a little late now, but the way I always recommend doing it to my clients is to activate the https site and leave the http one active for a few weeks. That way you can have the canonical on the http point to https. Google does not act immediately on things, you have to give them time to adjust and I feel this works best.
-
Hi Samuel,
Thanks for replying, I have however been on the above links before posting.
The points John Mueller mentioned were previously addressed, yet rankings have taken a colossal turn for the worse.
In the second link you posted i'm hoping this statement comes true!
"In our experience, even when 301's are correctly executed, we see a short term fall back (7-30) days and then about a 90% carry through after that period for about 90 days and then back to full strength. "Alex
-
Search Engine Roundtable has an article on the topic here that cites a Google+ discussion with Google's John Muller here.
Some potential issues that are discussed:
- don't forget the http->https redirect & other canonicalization things
- look into HSTS
- list the https site separately in webmaster tools (it's a different site)
- make sure the infrastructure can handle the higher load (SSL, caching, etc)
- check out the differences wrt. caching
I'd also look at past Q&As here and here. I hope this helps -- 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
-
How to rank for a keyword
Hi guys, I'm looking to rank a new blog for a search term which we currently already rank #1 for. I want to create a blog which provides a better solution to a searchers query and knock our current #1 page for this new one. Is there a way to do this simply without losing the real-estate the currently ranked #1 page has already accumulated? Or is just a matter of working on this new blog to find it's own way to the top? Thanks in advance, James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jameseacott0 -
HTTPs to HTTP Links
Hi Mozers, I have a question about the news that Google Chrome will start blocking mixed content starting in December 2019. That starting in December 2019, users that are presented insecure content will be presented a toggle allowing those Chrome users to unblock the insure resources that Chrome is blocking. And in January 2020, Google will remove that toggle option an will just start blocking mixed content or insecure web pages. Not sure what this means. What are the implications of this for a HTTPS page that has an HTTP link? Thanks, Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Huge Search Traffic Drop After Switching to HTTPS - No Recovery After Couple of Months
Hi In November, we have switched our website (https://www.insidermonkey.com) from HTTP to HTTPS. Initially, we noticed slight search traffic loss but later discovered it might be due to HTTPS switch. A month later we added the https version at search console, and then saw an immediate huge drop (about 25-30%). We discovered the problem might be due to poor redirection and noticed our redirects were 302s instead of 301s. To fix the problem, we implemented the 301 redirects and submitted the sitemap containing links to the old site at the new search console property (https). We've gone through points listed on the page below: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543 We fixed the redirects to 301 Double-checked the sitemaps Made sure we had a properly installed SSL certificate (Now, we get A+ from https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.insidermonkey.com) Made sure we have no mixed-content errors (we don't have any issues at search console.) We only avoided implementing HSTS, in case we might want to switch back to HTTP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | etakgoz
We had a small improvement in the following month, but our traffic did not fully recover. We wanted to test for the possibility to switch back HTTP by switching only 2 articles in our CMS to HTTP. Our traffic got worse, not only for those but for the whole site. Then we switched back those 2 articles to HTTPS again and implemented HSTS. It seems our search traffic getting worse day by day with no sign of improving. In the link below you can find the screenshot of our weekly search traffic between 1 October - 1 March. We are down from 500K weekly visitors to mere 167K last week. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Y1TQbj_YtGG4NhLORbEWbvITUkGKUa0G Any ideas or suggestions? We are willing to get professional help as well. What is the way to find a proper consultant for such problem with relevant experience?0 -
Traffic dropped suddenly
-In early January 2013, we had to switch servers after many years with the same one. We were highly ranked and getting about 8500 unique visitors per month. -We didn't notice the traffic falling because we were focussed on a major site redesign and addition that we launched in April 2013. Visits continued to fall, this time also because the company that launched it didn't double check their work and had some dead links etc. Those were all fixed by approximately June 2013.- early January 2014 we switched servers again because we were afraid the new server we moved to was perhaps ranked poorly or was possibly a spamming site before. Currently, nothing has changed. What was about 8500 unique visitors per month 18 months ago, is now about 1,000 and no leads are coming in at all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HasitR0 -
Effects of having both http and https on my website
You are able to view our website as either http and https on all pages. For example: You can type "http://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as http: as you navigate the site. You can also type "https://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as https: as you navigate the site. My question is....if you can view the entire site using either http or https, is this being seen as duplicate content/pages? Does the same hold true with "www.mywebsite.com" and "mywebsite.com"? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rexjoec1 -
Switch hosting to be closer to site visitors, and 99% dropped from rankings?
Last week I decided to switch for a UK server to a US one at Hostgator since most of my visitors are from the US. About nine hours later 99% of my pages disappeared from google rankings, only a few non-relevant pages are at position 100-200. All decent (1000-2000 word) articles on specific topics, are gone. These pages were getting 2-3 minutes per user of readership and a low bounce rate, so I think they were pretty good quality. Does anyone think it's possible I got accidentally added on a blacklisted IP? Or why would something like this happen. Since then, I've tried switching back to the old IP for 3 days, that didn't work. Now I've filed a reinclusion request with the details. Has anyone had a similar experience? What can possibly cause this massive drop in rankings and traffic? Any help is much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zpeti0 -
Serps drop on 21st
Hi, This is my website: http://goo.gl/fl5a5 Earlier i used to be on #1 and #3 page results for most of my results. But after 21st dec, my results went to 10th and 13th page of results. Is it due to latest panda update? http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-maybe-16121.html If so, can you guys examine my website and provide me your suggestions please... PS: i have followed only genuine kinda link buildings, my content is 100% unique. Will be waiting for your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegitt0 -
Site rankings dropped from ~15 to 500+ but Google says we were not penalized
2 months ago my site was ranking about 15 for my main KWs in the UK (my main market). On July 28 we dropped suddenly to ~500 or not in the top 500 at all in the UK for the 3 main keywords. However, these same terms are still ranking in other markets and we are doing okay in the UK for other terms targeted to the same pages. I cleaned up my links/content and sent a reconsideration request to Google. I then looked closer at my links and realized Google may be counting my affiliate links as if they were mine, so thought maybe that was the problem. I sent Google another reconsideration request and they wrote back the letter pasted below Any ideas about what happened or how I can get my rankings back? This definitely doesn't seem like it was just a simple algorithm change. There were no major changes done to our site, and we are still ranking in other markets. Dear site owner or webmaster
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider your site for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users.
If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search.
If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team0