Wrong redirect used

[Patrick_556]

Hi Folks,
I have a query & looking for some opinions.

Our site migrated to https://
Somewhere along the line between the developer & hosting provided 302 redirect was implemented instead of the recommended 301 (the 301 rule was not being honured in the htaccess file.)
1 week passed, I noticed some of our key phrases disappear from the serps When investigated, I noticed this the incorrect redirect was implemented.

The correct 301 redirect has now been implemented & functioning correctly.

• I have created a new https property in webmaster tools,
• Submitted the sitemap,
• Provided link in the robots.txt file to the https sitemap
• Canonical tags set to correct https.

My gut feeling is that Google will take some time to realise the problem & take some time to update the search results we lost.

Has anyone experienced this before or have any further thoughts on how to rectify asap.

[Patrick_556]

Hi Vettyy & Michael,

Thanks a million for your response.
Implemented both your suggestions, Screaming frog showed the previous 302 are now 301 so everything seems ok on that end. I have also updated Google My Places listing to reflect

Using site:mydomain.com has showed a mixture of https vs http so I am guessing I just need to wait & monitor - cross my fingers & hope for the best.

[MickEdwards]

It sounds like you have done all the right things.  I agree with Vettyy that you should use something like Screaming Frog to crawl all the old URLs just to double check there are no hanging 404 pages or missed http pages.  Switching to 301 will take a few days to filter through, so you could run cache:domain.com in Google on your most important pages to monitor when they are being crawled.  Also do you have a mix of http and https in Google in present?  It may very well be something to just wait and monitor.

A good tool for sniffing URLs headers is Fiddler.

[Vettyy]

I normally do a fetch and render in Google Search Console (webmaster tools) and submit to index. It gives you the option of submitting an individual page but I normally fetch and render the main domain and then select 'crawl this url and its direct links'. Then if there are only a couple of important pages not being indexed or recognized by Google, fetch and render and submit those individual ones.

type in site:www.yourdomain.com" in Google to monitor manually which pages are indexed as well.

If you have the time I would pop a list of your original urls in screaming frog to see which page their redirecting to, or test a couple of pages using this http://www.wheregoes.com/retracer.php to see how many redirects are in place.