Authority site drastic ranking drop after google https switch. Please Help!
-
Hi Mozers.
Since Google switched to the https version, our company website (http://we.register.it) indexing switched to the https version (https://www.register.it).
After that the ranking on Google dropped for almost every keyword.
The site is very old and got a great authority and PR 7. It ranked for same keywords for very long time
On each page from years there is the correct meta rel canonical. No spam, and WMT is ok.
Could you please help?
- The internal links are all in http, and in https. If you are https are in https (they are all relatives)
- No changes have been made and the subdomain is in that way from 8 years: the main url has always been http://we.register.it
- Google started this indexing switch around the 15 October
-
Hey Luca
Weird, a similar issue just happened to a friend's site here locally.
To clarify, http pages are still indexed if you search - site:https://www.register.it/ -inurl:https -- but it's just that both http AND https are indexed now.
Also - I don't see we.register.it loading at all - only www.register.it --- was this recently changed? Although I am seeing both we and www indexed in Google. Did we always redirect to www?
Since the HTTPS is redirecting now to HTTP Google will not be able to see the canonical. Here's what I think you should try;
- Undo the 301 redirect from https to http
- In your HTTPS robots.txt file, block crawling
- Register HTTPS in webmaster tools (if not already) and do a URL removal on all the pages you don't want indexed from HTTPS (probably all of them)
- I would strongly recommend sorting out your internal linking using absolute URL paths and ONLY link to pages with HTTPS when they actually are really HTTPS pages. Otherwise links to HTTP.
- Sort out your we vs. www subdomain issue.
This is honestly a slightly involved situation, where we can give cursory advice here, but just want to be transparent that if you're not completely comfortable in what to do, you might want to find someone who can peek behind the curtain (unfortunately as Moz Associates we're not able to log into your accounts or anything).
EDIT: just want to add that you should be sure you have updated and working XML sitemaps for the http and subdomain you want indexed, and they are submitted to WMT
-
No problem Federico.
I do have checked and there aren't any warnings in WMT. Everything looks right!It's very weird that google ranked http://we.register.it in top position for top keywords and since few days google started to index https version (ignored until then). Google first moved all ranking to https version keeping exact same positions and then started to drop everything down.
Any idea?
-
Oh yes, sorry Luca, I thought you were serving different canonicals in each version pointing to itself. The way you have them set is right.
I don't think this is the reason you are seeing the ranking or traffic drop, as actually using the canonicals the right way (the way you are) should avoid any duplicate content issue. But you better cover all the bases and fix everything that could be the reason.
By the way, did you check the manual actions sections in WMT?
-
Hi Federico,
What you are saying about the duplicate issue is definitely right intact we have already planned to 301 redirect one or the other protocol version (http 301 to https or viceversa). Anyway it's very weird that google is realizing this after about 10 years.
Anyway It's not clear to me how Canonicalization it makes it worse.
On the https://www.register.it page there is the following canonicalThis means that we are saying to google that the right page to index is http://we.register.it/ and https://www.register.it is a duplicate of http://we.register.it (which is the page was actually ranking until few days ago).
Am I wrong?Thanks
Luca -
As far as I understand, having both versions of the page HTTP and HTTPS can cause duplicate content issues. Serving pages under both protocols creates 2 pages of each page for search engines, even if the content is the same.
Canonicalization here even makes it worth, as you are actually telling engines to index both as different while they are actually the same.
You need to go with one or the other. Given the common choice and your type of business, I would choose HTTPS and 301redirect ALL HTTP pages to their HTTPS. That can be done with a single PHP line of code (if you are under PHP).
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Can we re rank our Penalyzed website in Google?
Hello This is Maqbul, from India. I have a jobs portal blog [ bharatrecruit.com]. It was getting around 50K to 100K Views a Day and made me $100 a day. But after a few months, my competitor made negative SEO with 12,000 Spammy backlinks. Suddenly my site was hit by Google and now it is getting 200 to 300 Pageviews a day. So the question is I did not disavow bad links for a long time like 3 to 4 months. Now I disavow all the bad links but the website is not ranking. Can we re-rank this site or create another website. Please reply must. None of the bloggers can answer this. Thanks, Regards Maqbul
Technical SEO | | vinaso960 -
Google indexing .com and .co.uk site
Hi, I am working on a site that is experiencing indexation problems: To give you an idea, the website should be www.example.com however, Google seems to index www.example.co.uk as well. It doesn’t seem to honour the 301 redirect that is on the co.uk site. This is causing quite a few reporting and tracking issues. This happened the first time in November 2016 and there was an issue identified in the DDOS protection which meant we would have to point www.example.co.uk to the same DNS as www.example.com. This was implemented and made no difference. I cleaned up the htaccess file and this made no difference either. In June 2017, Google finally indexed the correct URL, but I can’t be sure what changed it. I have now migrated the site onto https and www.example.co.uk has been reindexed in Google alongside www.example.com I have been advised that the http needs to be removed from DDOS which is in motion I have also redirected http://www.example.co.uk straight to https://www.example.com to prevent chain redirects I can’t block the site via robot.txt unless I take the redirects off which could mean that I lose my rankings. I should also mention that I haven't actually lost any rankings, it's just replaced some URLs with co.uk and others have remained the same. Could you please advise what further steps I should take to ensure the correct URL’s are indexed in Google?
Technical SEO | | Niki_10 -
Google Search Console Site Map Anomalies (HTTP vs HTTPS)
Hi I've just done my usual Monday morning review of clients Google Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools) dashboard and disturbed to see that for 1 client the Site Map section is reporting 95 pages submitted yet only 2 indexed (last time i looked last week it was reporting an expected level of indexed pages) here. It says the sitemap was submitted on the 10th March and processed yesterday. However in the 'Index Status' its showing a graph of growing indexed pages up to & including yesterday where they numbered 112 (so looks like all pages are indexed after all). Also the 'Crawl Stats' section is showing 186 pages crawled on the 26th. Then its listing sub site-maps all of which are non HTTPS (http) which seems very strange since the site is HTTPS and has been for a few months now and the main sitemap index url is an HTTPS: https://www.domain.com/sitemap_index.xml The sub sitemaps are:http://www.domain.com/marketing-sitemap.xmlhttp://www.domain.com/page-sitemap.xmlhttp://www.domain.com/post-sitemap.xmlThere are no 'Sitemap Errors' reported but there are 'Index Error' warnings for the above post-sitemap, copied below:_"When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some of the URLs were unreachable. Please check your webserver for possible misconfiguration, as these errors may be caused by a server error (such as a 5xx error) or a network error between Googlebot and your server. All reachable URLs will still be submitted." _
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
Also for the below site map URL's: "Some URLs listed in this Sitemap have a high response time. This may indicate a problem with your server or with the content of the page" for:http://domain.com/en/post-sitemap.xmlANDhttps://www.domain.com/page-sitemap.xmlAND https://www.domain.com/post-sitemap.xmlI take it from all the above that the HTTPS sitemap is mainly fine and despite the reported 0 pages indexed in GSC sitemap section that they are in fact indexed as per the main 'Index Status' graph and that somehow some HTTP sitemap elements have been accidentally attached to the main HTTPS sitemap and the are causing these problems.What's best way forward to clean up this mess ? Resubmitting the HTTPS site map sounds like right option but seeing as the master url indexed is an https url cant see it making any difference until the http aspects are deleted/removed but how do you do that or even check that's what's needed ? Or should Google just sort this out eventually ? I see the graph in 'Crawl > Sitemaps > WebPages' is showing a consistent blue line of submitted pages but the red line of indexed pages drops to 0 for 3 - 5 days every 5 days or so. So fully indexed pages being reported for 5 day stretches then zero for a few days then indexed for another 5 days and so on ! ? Many ThanksDan0 -
Has anyone had problems with google webmaster tools verified sites
Hi, i have just been into google webmaster tools and i have noticed that five of my websites are no longer verified. i have tried putting the code back into the head and also i have tried verifying it through google analaystics but nothing is working can anyone let me know what has happened and if anyone has noticed this regards
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
My Website Ranking is terribly drop
So sorry I really need your all help 😞 I'm really frustrated and stressed. For my website http://www.cma-academy.edu.sg , it has been ranking on Google 1st page (with the keywords "design course/design courses") for the past over 6 months and the traffic was really good... But it has been almost 2 months since the big drop... my ranking all is gone in just a week and now it's even not on the top 50.. While my competitors websites are stand stil. 😞 I seriously really want to cry because of this.. And I'm sure there is nothing much wrong with my SEO to be abandoned by Google like this and Google still index my webpage, but the crawling rate is so much slow than before.. I really need some help from the expert, especially from seomoz.. Please help me in this, I'm willing to answer any questions as well...
Technical SEO | | AngieDang0 -
Why is this site ranking better than me
Hi just used the compare tool to try and find out why a site is ranking better than me http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.lifestylemonthly.co.uk%2F my site is www.in2town.co.uk and the site i am comparing with is http://www.lifestylemonthly.co.uk/ Can anyone explain what is going on and how i can achieve better ranking results
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Help with pages Google is labeling "Not Followed"
I am seeing a number of pages that I am doing 301 redirects on coming up under the "Not Followed" category of the advanced index status in google webmasters. Google says this might be because the page is still showing active content or the redirect is not correct. I don't know how to tell if the page is still showing active content, and if someone can please tell me how to determine this it would be greatly appreciated. Also if you can provide a solution for how to adjust my page to make sure that the content is not appearing to be active, that would be amazing. Thanks in advance, here is a few links to pages that are experiencing this: www.luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/sunnyisles.html www.luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/summerield.html
Technical SEO | | Jdubin0 -
Does duplicate content on word press work against the site rank? (not page rank)
I noticed in the crawl that there seems to be some duplicate content with my word press blog. I installed a seo plugin, Yoast's wordpress seo plugin, and set it to keep from crawling the archives. This might solve the problem but my main question is can the blog drag my site down?
Technical SEO | | tommr10