Search traffic plummeting after HTTPS fumble - what to do now?

[tustind]

Hi all,

Our website typically gets about 80% of our traffic from organic Google search over thousands of keywords (i.e., no single keyword (or group of) drives a large portion of our traffic). It's a nine year old website, and we have been growing steadily -- including about 30-40% year-over-year growth for the past 9-months. That is, up until Feb 2nd.

On February 2nd, we switched to HTTPS. Everything was done per Google's recommendations: pages individually 301'd to HTTPS pages, no security warnings, added the new site in Webmaster Tools, etc. Google started to pick up our new site -- albeit 3 weeks into the transition, traffic was still significantly down.

However, the big problem that we discovered was our ad revenues were getting destroyed. We're an ad based business and our CPMs were tanking, some of our ad partners were having problems serving ads, etc. We were losing a lot of money.

So, we made the decision to reverse the HTTPS change and go back to HTTP. That was on Feb 22nd. Our traffic started to recover, and our ad rates did recover. However, 2-weeks after switching back -- March 8 -- our traffic started to fall and has continued to do so. Our traffic is now half of what it was a year ago, and only 1/3 of what it was before we made any changes.

I am totally at a loss for what to do. I have spent endless hours digging through Webmaster Tools with no real insights. Here's the most I've been able to glean:

• Google picked up the new HTTPS site a lot faster than it has reverted back to the HTTP. Particularly for AMP pages. We had about 2,000 indexed AMP pages, which were quickly picked up when we switched to HTTPS, but since changing back to HTTP Google has been slow to re-index the HTTP. Only 935 AMP indexed pages now.
• According to Webmaster Tools, our overall ranking position has not been affected (the overall average). However, in a sampling of keywords I notice that a number of keywords seem to have been dropped completely from ranking, while others show the same rank position but Google seems to only be showing us in the results intermittently -- e.g., rank is unchanged, but impressions and clicks are much lower.

I do not know what to do at this point, and sadly, I'm starting to get desperate for some help. I feel like all the hard work of almost a decade is slipping away and I have no idea how to change course. I've done absolutely everything I can think of from a technical standpoint.

Am I being penalized for abandoning the switch to HTTPS? Should I now try and reverse course again, and switch BACK to HTTPS? Is this a temporary bobble that Google's algo will 'forget'?

It's a super high quality website with long, unique, detailed articles. Not spammy and we have never had a manual action against us. I don't know what to do. Please help! Here's a link to the website.

Thank you in advance.

[EGOL]

I think that nobody replied because this is a really complex situation.  It could be something that went wrong with the http to https conversion.  It could be something entirely unrelated.

So, a good answer to your question would require much more work that what a person might be able to give in a Q&A reply.

If this was my site, my first question would be to dig into my analytics from before the first switch was made and compare to now.  What you want to find out first is what pages lost rankings.  Is this confined to a single area of the website or has the entire site been demoted.   Rankings analysis is the best way to do this.  If you don't have rankings data then dig into the same question by looking at traffic.

Look at that and let us know what you find.

[tustind]

Does anyone have any insight? Still looking for help/advice here. Thank you.