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!
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
-
Website Traffic Drop After Switch
Hey guys, two weeks ago we switched over to the new website, however we've experienced about a 20% drop in Google Organic traffic and it does not appear we are getting indexed correctly by Google. On search results it's not using the meta description and the links still point to the old pages. Robots is fine We are using the same IP address Re-directs are in for the pages in question. Sitemap was submitted to Google in Webmaster tools What else do we need to do?
Web Design | | ScottOlson0 -
Any body can help me to make my web site seo freindly?
any body can help me to make my web site seo freindly? i have not big budget please email me fabric35@hotmail.com
Web Design | | fabric-fabric0 -
Can anyone help me detect some SEO improvements onpage please...
Can anyone help me detect some SEO improvements onpage please... I have shortened the website URl so its not easily found when searched via search engines.. http://goo.gl/GlfMRl Please have a look and give me some tips. Thanks
Web Design | | Nettv0 -
Lots of Listing Pages with Thin Content on Real Estate Web Site-Best to Set them to No-Index?
Greetings Moz Community: As a commercial real estate broker in Manhattan I run a web site with over 600 pages. Basically the pages are organized in the following categories: 1. Neighborhoods (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/neighborhoods/midtown-manhattan) 25 PAGES Low bounce rate 2. Types of Space (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/commercial-space/loft-space)
Web Design | | Kingalan1
15 PAGES Low bounce rate. 3. Blog (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/how-long-does-leasing-process-take
30 PAGES Medium/high bounce rate 4. Services (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/brokerage-services/relocate-to-new-office-space) High bounce rate
3 PAGES 5. About Us (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/about-us/what-we-do
4 PAGES High bounce rate 6. Listings (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf)
300 PAGES High bounce rate (65%), thin content 7. Buildings (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/928-broadway
300 PAGES Very high bounce rate (exceeding 75%) Most of the listing pages do not have more than 100 words. My SEO firm is advising me to set them "No-Index, Follow". They believe the thin content could be hurting me. Is this an acceptable strategy? I am concerned that when Google detects 300 pages set to "No-Follow" they could interpret this as the site seeking to hide something and penalize us. Also, the building pages have a low click thru rate. Would it make sense to set them to "No-Follow" as well? Basically, would it increase authority in Google's eyes if we set pages that have thin content and/or low click thru rates to "No-Follow"? Any harm in doing this for about half the pages on the site? I might add that while I don't suffer from any manual penalty volume has gone down substantially in the last month. We upgraded the site in early June and somehow 175 pages were submitted to Google that should not have been indexed. A removal request has been made for those pages. Prior to that we were hit by Panda in April 2012 with search volume dropping from about 7,000 per month to 3,000 per month. Volume had increased back to 4,500 by April this year only to start tanking again. It was down to 3,600 in June. About 30 toxic links were removed in late April and a disavow file was submitted with Google in late April for removal of links from 80 toxic domains. Thanks in advance for your responses!! Alan0 -
What's the point of an EU site?
Buongiorno from 18 degrees C Wetherby UK 🙂 On this site http://www.milwaukeetool.eu/ the client wants to hold on to the EU site despite there being multiple standalone country sittes e.g. http://www.milwaukeetool.fr & http://www.milwaukeetool.co.uk Why would you ever need an EU site? I mean who ever searches for an EU site? If the client holds on to the eu site despite my position it's a waiste of time from a search perspective is the folowing the best appeasment? When a user enters the eu url or redirects to country the detected, eg I'm in Paris I enter www.milwaukeetool.eu it redirects to http://www.milwaukeetool.fr. My felling this would be the most pragmatic thing to do? Any ideas please,
Web Design | | Nightwing
Cioa,
David0 -
How does a Responsive Site kill SEO?
How does a Responsive Site poentially kill SEO? I've seen a few feeds on twitter how a website took a rankings dive after implementing a Responsive theme; yet, it's not clear to me what is actually going on within a Responsive site that would cause the SEO rank to tank? I can only speculate that it introduces a bunch of 404 errors, or that it changes all of the URLs into gibberish, so you loose all of the links coming into your website if not 301'ed? Can someone clarify, what are the actual mechanical issues on a Responsive website that becomes a concern to SEO? Thanks.
Web Design | | ExploreConsulting1 -
Question about web site structure
Is there an SEO advantage for individual pages to be in sub folders vs not being in a folder? Of course site managemnt is easier with folders if you have 100;s of pages...clearly a shorter URL is easier for humans to naviagte. store.com/gadgets store.com/lasers vs. store.com/gadgets/lasers
Web Design | | johnshearer0