Website Displayed by Google as Https: when all Secure Content is Blocked - Causing Index Prob.
-
Basically, I have no inbound likes going to https://www.mysite.com , but google is indexing the Homepage only as https://www.mysite.com
In June, I was re included to the google index after receiving a penalty... Most of my site links recovered fairly well. However my homepage did not recover for its top keywords.
Today I notice that when I search for my site, its displayed as https://
Robots.txt blocks all content going to any secure page. Leaving me sort of clueless what I need to do to fix this. Not only does it pose a problem for some users who click, but I think its causing the homepage to have an indexing problem.
Any ideas? Redirect the google bot only? Will a canonical tag fix this?
Thx
-
Yeah, I have all of that in place. I found 1 external link from an https , and 1 on my blog that was just an error one of my employees made. 2 Links total, at least thats what I found. Robots blocking everything you mentioned. My header uses absolute paths.
I do agree with you on one thing, once kicked, the little things that may not have mattered over the past 15 years all the sudden pop up as problems... At the same time I have heard the complete opposite, people are kicked and then they are right back where they used to be a few weeks after being included.
Competitive sabotage is positively happening, unless a random person who happens to live in the same city my competitor is located just went awol and decided they wanted to spam my offsite forums, attempt to hack the website multiple times, and add me to a spam link rink.
Anyway a webmaster says he has changed the canonical on their end to http , although it hasnt changed yet. I'm sure this could take a few days or longer to take place. Hopefully that is the fix, we'll see though and thanks for the advise!
-
Someone could probably have an answer to you within minutes if they had the domain URL available.
RE: Competitive sabotage, I very highly doubt it.
RE: Having just occurred - That is often a sticking-point for no good reason. Do not be concerned so much as to why it wasn't an issue before and focus on how to fix it now. Google's algorithm changes all the time. Your standing in the algorithm changes all the time. Trust can be lost if you get a penalty, even if you get out of it. One external link too many going to https, or one change in the crawl path so Googlebog ends up on the https site via a relative path link... Things can suddenly change for a variety of reasons. However, if you do what is being suggested you are very likely to put this issue behind you.
Here is what I do with eCommerce sites, typically:
- Rel canonical both versions to the http version
- Add a robots.txt block and robots meta noindex tag to shopping cart pages
- Use absolute paths, if possible (e.g. http://www.domain.com/file/ instead of .../file/), especially in your primary navigation and footer links.
If that doesn't work please let us know and we can evaluate the site for you.
Good luck!
-
Hmm, see no major changes have been made to the cart. The website has ranked for 15 years, so the https thing just popped up after the penalty/ re inclusion.
I'm wondering, since the canonical tag was added fairly recently. Do you think I should just fetch the homepage and submit again? Or even add a new page, and fetch/crawl/submit that?
Just to get a fresh crawl? Crawl stats show about 2250 on average daily, so I was expecting this https thing to be gone by now... Regardless of why they chose it to index over my normal link.
thx for the input
-
How about changing all of your links from relative to absolute in the HTML? If they're truly only getting there from navigation internally after visiting the shopping cart, this would solve that, yes? Just a thought.
-
If that is the case, then your shopping cart is not "acting right". Https will exist for every page in your site and it shouldn't. What cart are you using? I would redirect everything outside of the payment, cart, and contact pages to non secure. There is a disconnect from what robots files actually do and what people think they do. They are a suggestion, no index means not to add it to the index, but it does not mean don't go on that page. I have spiders on pages that are blocked from them all of the time.
-
My only concern with doing a redirect is this. The shopping cart is https: , so if you start the checkout process you will enter https:
If person decides to continue shopping... They will stay in the https, but since the checkout page is restricted to bots, essentially https doesnt exist and shouldnt show on any searches.
The sitemaps is clean, and a canonical is in place...
I have been having some issues with a competitor, is it possible they submitted https://www.mysite.com/ version of my website knowing that google will prefer this version?
thx for the advise
-
I would redirect the https version to http. Then I would make sure that there is a cannonical tag in place, next I would go over my site map and make sure that there isn't an link to the https page in there. After that you should be set, I wouldn't put it in the robots.txt though.
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
-
Google suddenly indexing 1,000 fewer pages. Why?
We have a site, blog.example.org, and another site, www.example.org. The most visited pages on www.example.org were redesigned; the redesign landed May 8. I would expect this change to have some effect on organic rank and conversions. But what I see is surprising; I can't believe it's related, but I mention this just in case. Between April 30 and May 7, Google stopped indexing roughly 1,000 pages on www.example.org, and roughly 3,000 pages on blog.example.org. In both cases the number of pages that fell out of the index represents appx. 15% of the overall number of pages. What would cause Google to suddenly stop indexing thousands of pages on two different subdomains? I'm just looking for ideas to dig into; no suggestion would be too basic. FWIW, the site is localized into dozens of languages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
Website Structured data in Google
Can anyone help me to show website structure data in Google when someone search my website in Google. I already added my website in Google and Google webmaster tool. Thanks in adv.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | talkinnetventure0 -
If a website trades internationally and simply translates its online content from English to French, German, etc how can we ensure no duplicate content penalisations and still maintain SEO performance in each territory?
Most of the international sites are as below: example.com example.de example.fr But some countries are on unique domains such example123.rsa
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dave_Schulhof0 -
Google Indexing Feedburner Links???
I just noticed that for lots of the articles on my website, there are two results in Google's index. For instance: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html and http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thewebhostinghero+(TheWebHostingHero.com) Now my Feedburner feed is set to "noindex" and it's always been that way. The canonical tag on the webpage is set to: rel='canonical' href='http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html' /> The robots tag is set to: name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp" /> I found out that there are scrapper sites that are linking to my content using the Feedburner link. So should the robots tag be set to "noindex" when the requested URL is different from the canonical URL? If so, is there an easy way to do this in Wordpress?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Google Site Extended Listing Not Indexed
I am trying to get the new Site map to be picked up by Google for the extended listing as its pulling from the old links and returning 404 errors. How can I get the site listing indexed quickly and have the extended listing get updated to point to the right places. This is the site - http://epaperflip.com/Default.aspx This is the search with the extended listing and some 404's - Broad Match search for "epaperflip"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Intergen0 -
Why do my https pages index while noindexed?
I have some tag pages on one of my sites that I meta noindexed. This worked for the http version, which they are canonical'd to but now the https:// version is indexing. The https version is both noindexed and has a canonical to the http version, but they still show up! I even have wordpress set up to redirect all https: to http! For some reason these pages are STILL showing in the SERPS though. Any experience or advice would be greatly appreciated. Example page: https://www.michaelpadway.com/tag/insurance-coverage/ Thanks all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
Content not indexed
How come i google content that resides on my website and on my homepage and my site doesn't come up? I know the content is unique i wrote that. I have a feeling i have some kind of a crawling issue but cannot determine what it is. I ran the crawling test and other tools and didn't find anything. Google shows me that pages are indexed but yet its weird try googling snippets of content and you'll see my site isnt anywhere. Have you experienced that before? First i thought it was penalized but i submitted the reconsideration request and it came back clear, No manual spam action found. And i did not get any message in my GWMT either. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CMTM0 -
Could Profanity Decrease Google Trust in a Website?
Could profanity such as swear words or cursing decrease the trust Google has in a website? For example, abusive comments... etc? I'm not talking about the SafeSearch filter, I'm talking about the overall trust of the website. Your thoughts and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640