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
-
.co.uk to .com domain move Dec 26th, still 40% down - do I risk moving back? (desperate)
Hi All, I'm desperate for a bit of advice. I run www.tyrereviews.com which has been my project since 2006, and after LOTS of hard work over 15 years held 1000's of P1 positions in the SERPs. I recently moved from the original .co.uk to .com to aid with future internationalising plans. I was very careful not to change ANYTHING else, just 301 from the UK to the .com and updated everything in webmaster consoles. My background is development and I spent weeks triple researching everything to make sure I followed all the google best practices, as this is my life's work and primary income source. From a tech point of view the change went perfectly, but sadly google quickly started deranking the new domain, and now two months on it seems to have stabilised at around 40% down on traffic year on year and mostly dropped from the UK region. This is mostly from medium to long tail keywords. One such example is "Michelin Primacy 4" in google UK, old webmaster tools is showing my average position this time last year as 1.4 and now I'm 12.4! The .com site is geo targeted to the UK by both webmaster tools and href lang tags. So, my question is, so I keep waiting, or do I give up andrisk the switch back to the uk domain before it's too late? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TyreReviews0 -
HTTP to HTTPS Question
Hello, I have a question regarding SSL Certificates I think I know the answer to but wanted to make sure. One of our clients’ site uses http for their pages but when they started creating Registration forms they created a full duplicate site on https (so now there are two versions of all of the pages). I know due to duplicate concerns this could be an issue and needs to resolved (as well as the pros and cons of both) but if they are already set up with https does it make sense to just move everything there or in some instances would it pay to keep some pages http (using canonical tags, redirects, htccess…etc)? – Most of the information I found related to making the decision prior to having both or describing the process but I couldn’t find anything that specifically related to if both are already present. I thought that the best approach because everything’s already set up is to just move everything over to the more secure one but was curious if anybody had any insight? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R0 -
Crawl rate drop
Hi Guys, I have a crawl rate drop in webmastertools and can't figure out way. In the last month I removed a lot o duplicate pages that we don't need anymore, there were at least 1.5 million pages. Can this be a motive? D7O5x1l
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silviu0 -
Client has moved to secured https webpages but non secured http pages are still being indexed in Google. Is this an issue
We are currently working with a client that relaunched their website two months ago to have hypertext transfer protocol secure pages (https) across their entire site architecture. The problem is that their non secure (http) pages are still accessible and being indexed in Google. Here are our concerns: 1. Are co-existing non secure and secure webpages (http and https) considered duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanguardCommunications
2. If these pages are duplicate content should we use 301 redirects or rel canonicals?
3. If we go with rel canonicals, is it okay for a non secure page to have rel canonical to the secure version? Thanks for the advice.0 -
Brand queries as a ranking signal?
Hi folks, I may be shooting WAY off the mark here for it to be laughable, but I wondered if anyone else was thinking about this. I was trying to get to sleep last night, but was thinking about rankings (as you do... You DO think about rankings instead of counting sheep don't you... I'm not weird or anything am I... AM I?) and it occurred to me that maybe Google uses frequency of brand queries as a ranking signal - was wondering if anyone had done any research into this? Assuming that if more people are searching for a brand name, then there must be an outside influence on this behaviour (offline ads or editorial for example) - and this all points to a site or company being popular or interesting - maybe Google looks at the growth in brand name queries, and boosts based on this... I have done no research into this (I was just thinking about it instead of counting sheep last night... because I probably AM weird...) but was wondering what people here thought of this. Also, I don't have time (or intelligence TBH) to run an experiment on this, but maybe one of you bright sparks would? Best wishes, Amelia PS - if I'm being STOOPID please be gentle with me 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
Why is my site not ranked?
Hey, does enybody have an idea, why my site www.detox.si is not ranked for the KW detox in www.google.si (Slovenia). It is being indexed, but it does not rank and i have no idea why. Best, M.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Spletnafuzija0 -
Why does my site keep dropping and dropping when it comes to impressions?
It all started very well but now it is all just going down and down even though I try to follow the proper guidelines. Could anyone give me some advice if I pm the link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | y3dc0 -
Bing and Yahoo Ranks work, google ranks not happening
Bing and Yahoo Ranks work, google ranks not happening please help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Djdealeyo0