Https Version of Homepage in SERPS
-
The https version of our homepage appears in Google's SERPs. We have rel canonical on the page pointing to the http version. We have a redirect in our htaccess that sends https to http.
I thought this was just a fluke and it would be fixed by the next crawl, but it's been like this for a few weeks now. Not only that, but we're losing rank a bit and I'm afraid there's a correlation.
Has this ever happened to anyone?
-
Thanks for the code. It worked! And thanks for providing the link to the server header check so I could properly test it.
-
Hi Marisa,
I'm no .htaccess expert, but that code looks a little wonky to me. Is it complete? I see lots of rewrite conditions, but not rewrite rules.
Second problem, when I run the https version through a server header check, it looks like the redirect serves a 302 status code, which indicates a temporary move and passes no link juice. Oh no!
So the first thing I would do is to make sure that any Rewrite rules in your htaccess file contain a 301 directive like this: [R=301,L]
For Example, the following might work:
<code>RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !^on$ RewriteRule (.*) http://yourdomain/$1 [R=301,L]</code>
So the first thing I would do is to make sure that any Rewrite rules in your htaccess file contain a 301 directive like this: [R=301,L]
Another option to consider is making your entire site secure to https. Many websites are moving this way, and Google has no problem crawling and ranking these sites appropriately. The important thing is to make sure you act consistently, and get those 302's solved!
It is odd that you have proper canonical tags and Google still displays the https version, but after you get this sorted out things will likely resolve themselves.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Hi Marisa, glad you were able to get the redirect set back up. Hopefully someone can help you with this secondary issue. htaccess can be pretty complex!
Sorry I couldn't be of more help in that area.
-
The redirect is back now (don't know what happened) but now when I click on the order page, which is supposed to be https, it redirects it to http even though I have the following code in the htaccess:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/order.html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/cgi-bin/order.cgi -
I am referring to the one in my profile. I will check that out and get back to you. Thanks.
-
Hi Marisa,
I had to dig, but is the site you are speaking about the one in your profile? When I check the header status of the https page I get a 200, meaning the 301 isn't being recognized. If you are referring to a different site please disregard.
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 Serps Not Showing HTTPS in Front of URL
Hi Everyone, We implemented the HTTPS change to our four websites about 6 months ago. I have found something that I feel is strange. The homepage of each website shows www.domain.com, but all the internal pages show https://www.domain.com/page. If you click through it shows it as secure, but I feel that because it is happening on all four websites, that something was done incorrectly. Here is one Google SERP: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1&biw=1920&bih=947&ei=gq9GWpizBuuF_Qa_p5e4Bw&q=tanzanite+jewelry+designs&oq=tanzanite+jewelry+designs&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0l2.130446.136028.0.136152.29.17.4.7.9.0.207.2214.7j9j1.17.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..1.28.2350...0i131k1j0i22i30k1.0.BA5-meGmuA0 As you can see, our site displays with no https, but all the internal pages do. It just worries me as I have seen our internal pages increasing in positioning, but not our homepage. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | vetofunk0 -
Moving from http to https - what do I need to do in Google Search Console?
Hi all, I have moved my site from http to https. I current have two profiles in Google Search Console: http://mysite.com
Technical SEO | | Bee159
http://www.mysite.com Do I need to set up the same but with https and if so, what do I then do with the http profiles? Do I delete them? Or just remove the sitemaps? Confused.0 -
Drupal, http/https, canonicals and Google Search Console
I’m fairly new in an in-house role and am currently rooting around our Drupal website to improve it as a whole. Right now on my radar is our use of http / https, canonicals, and our use of Google Search Console. Initial issues noticed: We serve http and https versions of all our pages Our canonical tags just refer back to the URL it sits on (apparently a default Drupal thing, which is not much use) We don’t actually have https properties added in Search Console/GA I’ve spoken with our IT agency who migrated our old site to the current site, who have recommended forcing all pages to https and setting canonicals to all https pages, which is fine in theory, but I don’t think it’s as simple as this, right? An old Moz post I found talked about running into issues with images/CSS/javascript referencing http – is there anything else to consider, especially from an SEO perspective? I’m assuming that the appropriate certificates are in place, as the secure version of the site works perfectly well. And on the last point – am I safe to assume we have just never tracked any traffic for the secure version of the site? 😞 Thanks John
Technical SEO | | joberts0 -
SERPs started showing the incorrect date next to my pages
Hi Moz friends, I've noticed since Tuesday, November 9, half of my post's meta dates have changed in regards to what appears next to the post in the search results. Although published this year, I'm getting some saying a random date in 2010! (The domain was born in 2013; which makes this even more odd). This is harming the CTR of my posts and traffic is decreasing. Some posts have gone from 200 hits a day to merely 30. As far as on our end of the website, we have not made any changes in regards to schema markup, rich snippets, etc. We have not edited any post dates. We have actually not added new content since about a week ago, and these incorrect dates have just started to appear on Tuesday. Only changes have been updating certain plugins in terms of maintenance. This is occurring on four of our websites now, so it is not just specific to one. All websites use Wordpress and Genesis theme. It looks like only half of the posts are showing weird dates we've never seen before (far off from the original published date as well as last updated date -- again, dates like 2010, 2011, and 2012 when none of our websites were even created until 2013). We cannot think of a correlation as to why certain posts are showing weird dates and others the correct. The only change we can think of that's related is back in June we changed our posts to show Last Updated date to give our readers an insight into when we changed it last (since it's evergreen content). Google started to use that date for the SERPs which was great, it actually increased traffic. I'm hoping it's a glitch and a recrawl soon may help sift it around. Anybody have experience with this? I've noticed Google fluctuates between showing our last updated date or not even showing a date at all sometimes at random. We're super confused here. Thank you in advance!
Technical SEO | | smmour2 -
How to Switch My Site to HTTPS in GWT?
I recently bought an SSL certificate and moved my site over to HTTPS. Now how do I make the change in Google Webmaster Tools?
Technical SEO | | sbrault740 -
Different serps
Hi, I seem to be making progress in recovering from penguin/panda. (maybe) However I get vastly different results if I search google in different ways for example if I specify the geographic location as US (I am in the UK) for prom hairstyles ie http://www.google.com/search?q=prom+hairstyles&gl=us (which I believe gives the SERPs for the US or at least it used to) my site (prom-hairstyles.org) comes in at number two or sometimes on the second page. But if I just search google.com it comes in at 450 or so. My question is do you get the same and why such a big difference? Thanks, Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
How do you get a Google+ pic in your SERP snippet
Hi from from 20 degrees C 83% humidity wetherby UK 🙂 A few weeks back i decided i needed to get my pretty face appearing in my serps for www.davidclick.com But after having set up a Gppgle+ account and linking my site to the Google+ account i think I may have done something wrong 😞 I linked to the Google+ page via a footer link in www.davidclick.com but alas I'm not able to get my face in my SERP which this website has: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/google-plus-picJPGcopy.jpg So my question is please - "How do you get your Google+ account image to appear in the SERPS. Ta muchly,
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
David0 -
Homepage display for seo
hi, Which is the best , seo speaking, about the homepage display with a CMS (joomla here). 1/ To display articles as "blog" and thus articles are always recent but not the same (chronological).. 2/ To display always a same article (just 1) but updated sometimes to times ? 3/ Both of them are good ? Tks a lot in advance..
Technical SEO | | mozllo0