HTTPS sitewide move has resulted in huge rankings drop...
-
Hi all,
An e-commerce site has recently moved protocol to https sitewide.
The site ranked page one for some great terms and now appear to be page 2 or below. Brand terms seem unphased and are still very strong, on both Google and Bing.
The following has been done;
- Everything 301'd from http to https
- Sitemap Edited
- Updated Webmaster Tools
- Robots.txt edited
- Crawled and Fetched all pages daily.
- Checked Paged are all follow,index.
- PPC Ads mass updated to new url's.
Most terms were ranked 1 - 9 on Bing, and Page 1/2 on Google.
HTTPS upgrade was done less than one week ago. The site is not payday loan related, nor was it hit by latest panda escapades. Everything on the site is relevant to the content.
Has anybody else been in this position, what else can be done?
I'd appreciate any help and advice. Thank You
-
Thanks very much for your feedback! It helps a lot.
-
It's very hard to pinpoint whether doing it had a positive affect. I'm going to say if it did, it was extremely minimal. It's 'nice' for site visitors to see the site is verified I guess.
I'd still do it again, as Google said it's worthwhile. Just a shame it's taken so long, and we couldn't measure success of failure.
I've done it on another site since, which was far smoother, rankings and traffic remained the same though.
-
Thanks for that! It helps me understand what the risks may be in doing this now. Am I wrong in deducing you had a long-term positive gain overall?
Thanks!
-
Hi,
It took roughly 4 months to fully recover.
The dent in the graph doesn't look that significant, but the spike towards Christmas is way into the 300,000 mark..
Paid traffic paid a valuable part in keeping traffic steady (as you can see).
Regards
Alex
-
Hiya,
I wondered if your site has recovered fully now and how long it took for it to do so?
Many thanks!
-
5 weeks on, and the site is still recovering.
Obviously during this time Google announced its preferred status to HTTPS sites too!
Only yesterday did we return top for the brand name,.
To put a figure on how much damage has been caused on this matter, organic traffic (Google only) was down 35%, and organic revenue (Google only) Y-O-Y last month was down 60%.
Would love to know the reasoning for the huge drop in rankings, and the recovery time period to expect.
-
This indicates to me that something is wrong besides waiting for a 301 redirect situation to be properly indexed / acknowledged. This is not currently a ranking factor, but there have even been murmurings of Googlers favouring HTTPS sites - it's certainly a plus to be on HTTPS URLs in Matt Cutts' opinion - http://www.seroundtable.com/google-ssl-ranking-18256.html
At the very least, the move should not hurt you, especially not for brand terms two weeks later.
Unfortunately I am really not sure what the problem is likely to be, assuming that everything about the redirection has been done by the book and you are not seeing any errors on that front. A continued drop might warrant a request for reconsideration, but that is a last-ditch effort in most cases.
-
One week on and brand terms have gone the exact same way. We're on page 2 for our brand, yet dominated page one with 5-6 links before this https move. With absolutely no glimmer of hope for our organic terms.
None of the keywords which were been worked on (and getting results with) are getting anywhere,
I know and understand it is a waiting game to get the rankings back, however it is painful to see the rankings in such a state.
Can anybody recommend further steps to give the site a boost?
This article from Rand fascinates me, and gives some potential light at the end of the tunnel for a quick fix! http://moz.com/rand/queries-clicks-influence-googles-results/
Thanks in advance
-
It will cause duplicated content, that is why you add the canonical tag that points to the https site. What you are doing is waiting for Google to react to your address change and covering your bases while you are waiting. Google is big, things like address changes don't happen overnight, they could take weeks to fully index correctly. Risking a little duplicate content to me is worth not having the traffic drop off of a site.
-
One week ago. Would that not cause duplicate content? I thought about doing it that way round, but was a little worried about duplicating the whole site. (In hindsight it couldn't have been any worse)
Thank you for your reply.
-
How long has it been since you switched? It might be a little late now, but the way I always recommend doing it to my clients is to activate the https site and leave the http one active for a few weeks. That way you can have the canonical on the http point to https. Google does not act immediately on things, you have to give them time to adjust and I feel this works best.
-
Hi Samuel,
Thanks for replying, I have however been on the above links before posting.
The points John Mueller mentioned were previously addressed, yet rankings have taken a colossal turn for the worse.
In the second link you posted i'm hoping this statement comes true!
"In our experience, even when 301's are correctly executed, we see a short term fall back (7-30) days and then about a 90% carry through after that period for about 90 days and then back to full strength. "Alex
-
Search Engine Roundtable has an article on the topic here that cites a Google+ discussion with Google's John Muller here.
Some potential issues that are discussed:
- don't forget the http->https redirect & other canonicalization things
- look into HSTS
- list the https site separately in webmaster tools (it's a different site)
- make sure the infrastructure can handle the higher load (SSL, caching, etc)
- check out the differences wrt. caching
I'd also look at past Q&As here and here. I hope this helps -- 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
-
User intent and ranking
Hello, I was doing search to see who ranks on the keyword "bike tours" i noticed a lot of website rank without content "text". Is it because they fulfil the user intent with a search box where you can search by date and destination, trip type and price that google ranks those webpages ? It is the same for the keyword Paris bike tours https://www.fattiretours.com/paris How do they rank with so little content (once again is it because the fulfil the user intent ) Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
What to do when migrating to HTTPS?
Hi guys, I am planning on migrating an entire http domain to https. For it to be successful and making sure that Google indexes these new https URLs and not losing any SEO juice, do I simply make sure all legacy URLs get 301 redirected to those new https URLs? Finally what is a server side 301 redirect? What are all the kinds of 301 redirects if there are multiple kinds? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art1 -
Would a sitewide link to a 1mb exe download harm rankings?
We're in a games market and we have a link on every page to our download. The link is an aspx but there is no downloadpage as such - clicking on the link triggers an executable download that is just less than one meg. We've been looking at the top results in our very competitive market and the top 8 don't seem to have a download. Coincidence or a real factor?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dancape0 -
Converting to HTTPS
I have a 10 yr old website that we are just now adding a Symantec SSL with Extended Validation. I've seen some older posts about whether switching to URL's to HTTP effects Google ranking and I understand it may in the short run, but I wondered if anyone had any updated info about how best to go about this. Are there any step by step articles that could walk me through this? Our certificate is already installed now, but we haven't forced it out there yet. If I understand right, we will use the HTTPS on the entire site. I am not very experienced with 301's, but I believe I can set this up in Godaddy.com where our domain is reigstered so that our old HTTP forwards to HTTPS. Also, I don't think this effects anything within GWT so I don't think I have to make any changes there. Am I missing anything? FYI, the prices for this on the Symantec site are pretty high for a small business like ours. I looked around and found https://www.thesslstore.com/, an SSL reseller, had cheaper prices listed on their site. As it turns out, I called to ask a technical question and the sales person offered to email me a custom quote that was even cheaper than what was listed on their site. So if you are dealing with a limited budget, I might recommend you call The SSL Store and get a quote from them. I am not an affiliate and having nothing to do with them, I was just happy with their service and I believe it cost me about 1/2 of the price on the Symantec site. Hope that helps someone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jacksghost0 -
Why is my ranking not improving???
Our site is about 4 months old now, although the domain is older. We are adding fresh new content, building good facebook/twitter/Goolge+ and undertaking good PR - but our ranking does not seem to be improving at all. Have I missed something obvious???? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
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 -
How come I get different rankings on same word in local search results of Google?
Dear fellow Mozzer's, for one of my clients I get different local results in Google. My client is a real-estate broker and when I search on "real-estate agent" + the city name we are on top. So whoohoo you would say BUT when Firefox has the exact city name determined as the location I am in and I only use "real-estate agent" I get also the local results but we are listed as number 8?? Hope anyone can give me insights as I have no idea what's causing this. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | newtraffic0 -
Ranking
Hi All, I have been working on a car insurance site which targets US market. we have been doing all types of links to the site like - good related directory links, related blogpost and reviews. the site is updated daily with a fresh unique content. what more is needed to get it to the first page. we are currently ranking in the range of 40 - 50 on the page 4 or page 5. we have also recently done a redesign with a new cms, done a good press release but not seeing much of changes. please if anyone in the same industry or with some experience can suggest us. we are using all white hat seo & I can understand the amount of competition in this niche. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Markyseo0