Https Loss of Search traffic
-
Hey guys,
We moved our site to from http to https. We subsequently lost 25% in our search traffic in 1 Month. We changed a few other pieces such as images, added new content etc.
Has anyone got any suggestions on how we start to understand what happened?
Thanks in advance.
-
I would also set up your HTTPS site as a new one in Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools (Bing automatically does it), but set it up in GWT. Once you have done that, make sure your sitemap is added and crawled again.
Get GWT to crawl the sitemap again from your non HTTPS account too, so redirects are recorded.
-
Hi
I can see that Tom and Ryan have done a great job of handling the most obvious issue that may have caused your site to drop in terms of changing to HTTPS. You have also mentioned the fact that you have changed some significant on-page factors which could definitely be the culprit.
However I thought I would just add this - I saw someone move to HTTPS and they did implement the correct redirects and then register both versions of the site in webmaster tools and so on. However they still saw a noticeable drop in their organic traffic which turned out to be caused by a significant drop in site speed after moving to HTTPS.
You may have already checked and your site may seem fast but I would double check the speed of your site with Google Page Speed Insights and GTMetrix (another speed tool I like). If your site seems slow look at what you can do to improve it with the recommendations on these tools (as this will help your site whatever) - also speak to your host and explain you are seeing a decrease in speed can they help.
This tactic worked in this case and I just thought I would mention it as another angle to approach this.
Hope this helps!
-
Great! It sounds like you're on the right track John, especially considering that there are some title and H1 changes took place. Cheers!
-
Hey Ryan,
Thanks for the answer and the link, We will add it to that pingfarm. Thanks guys but we need to make sure this is in order.
-
Hi Tom,
Thanks a million for the great answer. I missed that in my description, we have added in 301 redirects for all links but still saw a drop. My apologies, I left that out initially.
We have also identified that we are missing a number of H1's and have changed our title tags.
-
To follow up on Tom's great response, even with the 301 redirect in place, you could still be experiencing the delay typical to redirection. Pinging the new domain may help you speed up that process. To do so create a list of the site pages and submit them to PingFarm and 247pinger. Those will help to verify the new site and de-index the old URLs.
Also, as a reference, here's Google's over view of transitioning to HTTPS: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543. Cheers!
-
Hi John
The first thing I would ask in this situation is - did you 301 redirect the non SSL (http) versions of your pages to the SSL (https)?
If you didn't - that could be a big problem. First of all, that could run into a couple of duplicate content issues and canonical issues, as you would have two versions of each page battling each other for prominence. However, what I think would be more of an issue is the fact that if you didn't redirect the pages and if you didn't change any of your inbound links - the links that you had pointing to the website might now be pointing to inactive pages, and the link 'equity' your site had may now be lost.
This might be a redundant point as you may have implemented the redirects - but it's always the first thing that I look out for.
If you're looking to redirect all of the http pages, this bit of code is something you can add to your htaccess file to redirect all URLs on your site:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}Again, apologies if you have already done this but if not, I hope it helps.
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
-
(Urgent) losing traffic after 301 redirect
We face a seo problem of losing traffic after 301 redirect.We have used 301 redirect from a sub-domain url to main domain, after a few month, we discovered that the traffic in google is dropped 40% as well as yahoo dropped 50% without reason, we have updated sitemap already, but we cannot find any reason for the traffic dropped till now..The original url (more then 5000 links)https://app.example.com/ebook Redirected Urlhttps://www.example.com/ebookThank you for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yukung0 -
How to Target Country Specific Website Traffic?
I have a website with .com domain but I need to generate traffic from UK? I have already set my GEO Targeting location as UK in Google Webmasters & set country location as UK in Google Analytics as well but still, i get traffic only from India. I have also set Geo-targeting code at the backend of the website. But nothing seems works. Can anyone help me how can is do this? I am unable to understand what else can be done.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoninj0 -
404s clinging on in Search Console
What is a reasonable length of time to expect 404s to be resolved in Search Console? There was a mass of 404s that were built up from directory changes and filtering URLs that have been fixed. These have all been fixed but of course there are some that slipped the net. How long is it reasonable to expect the old 404s that don't have any links to drop away from Search Console? New 404s are still being reported over 4 months later. 'First detected' is always showing as a date later than the fixed 404's date. Is this reasonable, i've never seen this being so resilient and not clean up like this? We manually fix these 404s and like popcorn more turn up. Just to add the bulk of 404s came into existence around a year ago and left for around 8 months.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
How to rank an ecommerce site for search terms starting with how where why
Hi guys, I just got a new SEO job for an e commerce store, the client is asking to rank the site for keywords like where to buy used phone, where to sell my used phone for for best rates and so, the question is how can i achieve that, can anyone help me with some concrete suggestion? Thanks in Advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mkhurramali0 -
Domain Migration of high traffic site:
We plan to perform a domain migration in 6 months time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
I read the different articles on moz relating to domain migration, but some doubts remain: Moving some linkworthy content upfront to new domain was generally recommended. I have such content (free e-learning) that I could move already now to new domain.
Should I move it now or just 2 months before migration?
Should I be concerned whether this content and early links could indicate to google a different topical theme of the new domain ? E.g. in our case free elearning app vs a commercial booking of presential courses of my core site which is somehow but not extremely strongly related) and links for elearning app may be very specific from appstores and from sites about mobile apps. we still have some annoying .php3 file extensions in many of our highest traffic pages and I would like to drop the file-extension (no further URL change). It was generally recommended to minimize other changes at the same time of domain migration, but on the other hand implementing later another 301 again may also not be optimum and it would save time to do it all at the same time. Shall I do the removal of the file extension at the same time of the domain migration or rather schedule it for 3 months later? On the same topic, would the domain migration be a good occasion to move to https instead of http at the same time, or also should we rather do this at a different time? Any thoughts or suggestions?0 -
Google Search Results...
I'm trying to download every google search results for my company site:company.com. The limit I can get is 100. I tried using seoquake but I can only get to 100. The reason for this? I would like to see what are the pages indexed. www pages, and subdomain pages should only make up 7,000 but search results are 23,000. I would like to see what the others are in the 23,000. Any advice how to go about this? I can individually check subdomains site:www.company.com and site:static.company.com, but I don't know all the subdomains. Anyone cracked this? I tried using a scrapper tool but it was only able to retrieve 200.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Why is Google Displaying this image in the search results?
Hi i'm looking at advice on how to remove or change a particular image Google is displaying in the search results. I have attached a screenshot. From the first look of it, i assumed the image would be related and be on the dealers Google+ Local Page: https://plus.google.com/118099386834104087122/about?hl=en But there are no photos. The image seems to be coming from the website. Is there a way to stop Google from displaying this image or making them display a totally different image. Thanks, Chris XzfsnUy.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mattcarter080 -
Strategy After Switching To HTTPS
So we made a big mistake with our website last month. Without thinking things through, our entire website was switched to using a SSL certificate and https urls on all pages of the site. I know it is recommended that SSL is only used on sensitive pages, but we have a lead form on all pages. Of course Google is taking some time to adjust to all of our urls changing. A week later we lost all of our Google search rankings. It has now been about 3 weeks and our site is showing some signs of recovery, but obviously we'd like a quicker recovery. We have done proper 301 redirects throughout the site, but unfortunately our CMS has been a little buggy creating some other problems to fix along the way. So my main question is, how can we speed up the process? I do understand that we stand to lose 5-10% value of our old links due to the redirects. Is there anything else we should be doing to recover quicker though? Also, at this point, would it make any sense to switch back to http urls? Or would that just delay things further? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BorisD0