Google Indexing Of Pages As HTTPS vs HTTP
-
We recently updated our site to be mobile optimized. As part of the update, we had also planned on adding SSL security to the site. However, we use an iframe on a lot of our site pages from a third party vendor for real estate listings and that iframe was not SSL friendly and the vendor does not have that solution yet. So, those iframes weren't displaying the content.
As a result, we had to shift gears and go back to just being http and not the new https that we were hoping for.
However, google seems to have indexed a lot of our pages as https and gives a security error to any visitors. The new site was launched about a week ago and there was code in the htaccess file that was pushing to www and https. I have fixed the htaccess file to no longer have https.
My questions is will google "reindex" the site once it recognizes the new htaccess commands in the next couple weeks?
-
That's not going to solve your problem, vikasnwu. Your immediate issue is that you have URLs in the index that are HTTPS and will cause searchers who click on them not to reach your site due to the security error warnings. The only way to fix that quickly is to get the SSL certificate and redirect to HTTP in place.
You've sent the search engines a number of very conflicting signals. Waiting while they try to work out what URLs they're supposed to use and then waiting while they reindex them is likely to cause significant traffic issues and ongoing ranking harm before the SEs figure it out for themselves. The whole point of what I recommended is it doesn't depend on the SEs figuring anything out - you will have provided directives that force them to do what you need.
Paul
-
Remember you can force indexing using Google Search Console
-
Nice answer!
But you forgot to mention:
- Updating the sitemap files with the good URLs
- Upload them to Google Search Console
- You can even force the indexing at Google Search Console
Thanks,
Roberto
-
Paul,
I just provided the solution to de-index the https version. I understood that what's wanted, as they need their client to fix their end.And of course that there is no way to noindex by protocol. I do agree what you are saying.
Thanks a lot for explaining further and prividing other ways to help solvinf the issue, im inspired by used like you to help others and make a great community.
GR.
-
i'm first going to see what happens if I just upload a sitemap with http URLs since there wasn't a sitemap in webmaster tools from before. Will give you the update then.
-
Great! I'd really like to hear how it goes when you get the switch back in.
P.
-
Paul that does make sense - i'll add the SSL certificate back, and then redirect from https to http via the htaccess file.
-
You can't noindex a URL by protocol, Gaston - adding no-index would eliminate the page from being returned as a search result regardless of whether HTTP or HTTPS, essentially making those important pages invisible and wasting whatever link equity they may have. (You also can't block in robots.txt by protocol either, in my experience.)
-
There's a very simple solution to this issue - and no, you absolutely do NOT want to artificially force removal of those HTTPS pages from the index.
You need to make sure the SSL certificate is still in place, then re-add the 301-redirect in the site's htaccess file, but this time redirecting all HTTPS URLs back their HTTP equivalents.
You don't want to forcibly "remove" those URLs from the SERPs, because they are what Google now understands to be the correct pages. If you remove them, you'll have to wait however long it takes for Google and other search engines to completely re-understand the conflicting signals you've sent them about your site. And traffic will inevitably suffer in that process. Instead, you need to provide standard directives that the search engines don't have to interpret and can't ignore. Once the search engines have seen the new redirects for long enough, they'll start reverting the SERP listings back to the HTTP URLs naturally.
The key here is the SSL cert must stay in place. As it stands now, a visitor clicking a page in the search engine is trying to make an HTTPS connection to your site. If there is no certificate in place, they will get the harmful security warning. BUT! You can't just put in a 301-redirect in that case. The reason for this is that the initial connection from the SERP is coming in over the "secure channel". That connection must be negotiated securely first, before the redirect can even be read. If that first connection isn't secure, the browser will return the security warning without ever trying to read the redirect.
Having the SSL cert in place even though you're not running all pages under HTTPS means that first connection can still be made securely, then the redirect can be read back to the HTTP URL, and the visitor will get to the page they expect in a seamless manner. And search engines will be able to understand and apply authority without misunderstandings/confusion.
Hope that all makes sense?
Paul
-
Noup, Robots.txt works on a website level. This means that there has to be a file for the http and another for the https website.
And, there is no need for waiting until the whole site is indexed.Just to clarify, robots.txt itself does not remove pages already indexed. It just blocks bots from crawling a website and/or specific pages with in it.
-
GR - thanks for the response.
Given our site is just 65 pages, would it make sense to just put all of the site's "https" URLs in the robots.txt file as "noindex" now rather than waiting for all the pages to get indexed as "https" and then remove them?
And then upload a sitemap to webmaster tools with the URLS as "http://"?
VW
-
Hello vikasnwu,
As what you are looking for is to remove from index the pages, follow this steps:
- Allow the whole website to be crawable in the robots.txt
- add the robots meta tag with "noindex,follow" parametres
- wait several weeks, 6 to 8 weeks is a fairly good time. Or just do a followup on those pages
- when you got the results (all your desired pages to be de-indexed) re-block with robots.txt those pages
- DO NOT erase the meta robots tag.
Remember that http://site.com andhttps://site.com are different websites to google.
When your client's website is fixed with https, follow these steps:- Allow the whole website (or the parts wanted to be indexed) to be crawable in robots.txt
- Remove the robots meta tag
- Redirect 301 http to https
- Sit and wait.
Information about the redirection to HTTPS and a cool checklist:
The Big List of SEO Tips and Tricks for Using HTTPS on Your Website - Moz Blog
The HTTP to HTTPs Migration Checklist in Google Docs to Share, Copy & Download - AleydaSolis
Google SEO HTTPS Migration Checklist - SERoundtableHope I'm helpful.
Best luck.
GR.
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
-
Shopify Website Page Indexing issue
Hi, I am working on an eCommerce website on Shopify.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bhisshaun
When I tried Indexing my newly created service pages. The pages are not getting indexed on Google.
I also tried manual indexing of each page and submitted a sitemap but still, the issue doesn't seem to be resolved. Thanks0 -
Best practice to redirect http to https
I have an SSL certificate on our domain but at times some search results still list the HTTP version. Clicking on this then warns the user about security and they leave. To avoid this I am using this in the htaccess file to redirect all HTTP visits to the https version. RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavpeds
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://domain.com/$1 [R,L] Is this ok? I notice on Moz toolbar it give a 302 temporary redirect I am thinking this isn't good and needs to be a 301 maybe? What is the best practice in this situation?1 -
How do we decide which pages to index/de-index? Help for a 250k page site
At Siftery (siftery.com) we have about 250k pages, most of them reflected in our sitemap. Though after submitting a sitemap we started seeing an increase in the number of pages Google indexed, in the past few weeks progress has slowed to a crawl at about 80k pages, and in fact has been coming down very marginally. Due to the nature of the site, a lot of the pages on the site likely look very similar to search engines. We've also broken down our sitemap into an index, so we know that most of the indexation problems are coming from a particular type of page (company profiles). Given these facts below, what do you recommend we do? Should we de-index all of the pages that are not being picked up by the Google index (and are therefore likely seen as low quality)? There seems to be a school of thought that de-indexing "thin" pages improves the ranking potential of the indexed pages. We have plans for enriching and differentiating the pages that are being picked up as thin (Moz itself picks them up as 'duplicate' pages even though they're not. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggiaco-siftery0 -
Google indexed wrong pages of my website.
When I google site:www.ayurjeewan.com, after 8 pages, google shows Slider and shop pages. Which I don't want to be indexed. How can I get rid of these pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward0 -
Do internal links from non-indexed pages matter?
Hi everybody! Here's my question. After a site migration, a client has seen a big drop in rankings. We're trying to narrow down the issue. It seems that they have lost around 15,000 links following the switch, but these came from pages that were blocked in the robots.txt file. I was wondering if there was any research that has been done on the impact of internal links from no-indexed pages. Would be great to hear your thoughts! Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Google is indexing the wrong page
Hello, I have a site I am optimizing and I cant seem to get a particular listing onto the first page due to the fact google is indexing the wrong page. I have the following scenario. I have a client with multiple locations. To target the locations I set them up with URLs like this /<cityname>-wedding-planner.</cityname> The home page / is optimized for their port saint lucie location. the page /palm-city-wedding-planner is optimized for the palm city location. the page /stuart-wedding-planner is optimized for the stuart location. Google picks up the first two and indexes them properly, BUT the stuart location page doesnt get picked up at all, instead google lists / which is not optimized at all for stuart. How do I "let google know" to index the stuart landing page for the "stuart wedding planner" term? MOZ also shows the / page as being indexed for the stuart wedding planner term as well but I assume this is just a result of what its finding when it performs its searches.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mediagiant0 -
Best way to get pages indexed fast?
Any suggestion on best ways to get new sites pages indexed? Was thinking getting high pr inbound links on fiverr but always a little risky right? Thanks for your opinions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mweidner27820 -
Adding Orphaned Pages to the Google Index
Hey folks, How do you think Google will treat adding 300K orphaned pages to a 4.5 million page site. The URLs would resolve but there would be no on site navigation to those pages, Google would only know about them through sitemap.xmls. These pages are super low competition. The plot thickens, what we are really after is to get 150k real pages back on the site, these pages do have crawlable paths on the site but in order to do that (for technical reasons) we need to push these other 300k orphaned pages live (it's an all or nothing deal) a) Do you think Google will have a problem with this or just decide to not index some or most these pages since they are orphaned. b) If these pages will just fall out of the index or not get included, and have no chance of ever accumulating PR anyway since they are not linked to, would it make sense to just noindex them? c) Should we not submit sitemap.xml files at all, and take our 150k and just ignore these 300k and hope Google ignores them as well since they are orhpaned? d) If Google is OK with this maybe we should submit the sitemap.xmls and keep an eye on the pages, maybe they will rank and bring us a bit of traffic, but we don't want to do that if it could be an issue with Google. Thanks for your opinions and if you have any hard evidence either way especially thanks for that info. 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw0