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
-
Will Reduced Bounce Rate, Increased Pages/Session, Increased Session Duration-RESULT IN BETTER RANKING?
Our relaunched website has a much lower bounce rate (66% before, now 58%) increased pages per session (1.89 before, now 3.47) and increased session duration (1:33 before, now 3:47). The relaunch was December 20th. Should these improvements result in an improvement in Google rank? How about in MOZ authority? We have not significantly changed the content of the site but the UX has been greatly improved. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
Best approach to rank for this keyword?
Hi i want to rank for the keyword "white sandals" on Google Australia. Currently, the top 5 ranking pages are not optimised and specific to white sandals. See screenshot: https://image.prntscr.com/image/WenSRHqTTFSqYNg2MHvH1A.png To rank for this keyword, would you create a page dedicated to white sandals even though it looks like it doesn't matter and you could rank the broader sandals page (not colour specific). Any recommendations? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crazy4seo780 -
Ranking on google but not Bing?
Any reason why I could be ranking for Google but not Bing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Ranking go down why ?
Hello, Thank you , if you help us our web url www.prismpharmamachinery.com before some time very top ranking but now going down 5-7 pages in google any SEO expert can help for that Regards pooja
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Poojath0 -
Ranking dropped off massively: 25 August
HI have been working on the site http://www.schoolguide.co.uk/ we had something odd happen around the 25 of August our ranking just tanked. Now there was no warning in webmaster tools. Moz weather forecast didn't show anything crazy. We didn't do anything major to site. The site lost pretty much all it's long tail ranking and about 5% of the indexed pages. What could cause this? The only thing of prominence we did was get a link from huffington post article. Thanks again everyone Ed
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdBen0 -
Why are my competitors ranking higher?
I know there could be numerous reasons here why they may be ranking higher but I hope I can get some answers from the details that I provide below I am looking at one particular page so its www.mydomain.com/urlhere.html I have page rank 5 on this url I have had the domain for 7 years I have videos on this page (my competitors do too) I have 65 linking root domains 14,000 inbound links to this page. I have 6 keyword phrases in my title tag My main competitor has a lot more pages and has been around longer, but has lower page rank and lower inbound links to that page. They also have less words in the title tag.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phoenixcg0 -
Rank went up, But?
ok, I have been optimizing a sit for a while and decided to drop the flash site build an HTML site instead for obvious reasons. But, as I was building the new site, BANG! a big jump in Google rank? How can this be, I thought out loud. Must be all my anchor text kicking in...So, I am left with this question...Or did google pick up on my new site as I was building it. I build it on a new DNS, then revert back to the main DNS... Drop the HTML site and continue my link getting with the main site? Or chalk it up under something else and roll with new site. I hope that was not to confusing
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com0