HTTP HTTPS Migration Gone Wrong - Please Help!
-
We have a large (25,000 Products) ecommerce website, and we did an HTTP=>HTTPS migration on 3/14/17, and our rankings went in the tank, but they are slowly coming back. We initially lost 80% of our organic traffic. We are currently down about 50%.
Here are some of the issues. In retrospect, we may have been too aggressive in the move.
- We didn't post our old sitemaps on the new site until about 5 days into the move.
- We created a new HTTPS property in search console.
- Our redirects were 302, not 301
- We also had some other redirect issues
- We changed our URL taxonomy from http://www.oursite.com/category-name.html to https://www.oursite.com/category-name (removed the .html)
- We changed our filters plugin. Proper canonicals were used, but the filters can generate N! canonical pages. I added some parameters (and posted to Search Console) and noindex for pages with multiple filter choices to cut down on our crawl budget yesterday.
Here are some observations:
- Google is crawling like crazy. Since the move, 120,000+ pages per day. These are clearly the filtered pages, but they do have canonicals.
- Our old sitemaps got error messages "Roboted Out". When we test URLs in Google's robots.txt tester, they test fine. Very Odd.
- At this point, in search console
a. HTTPS Property has 23,000 pages indexed
b. HTTP Property has 7800 pages indexed
c. The crawl of our old category sitemap (852 categories) is still pending, and it was posted and submitted on Friday 3/17 - Our average daily organic traffic in search console before the move was +/-5,800 clicks. The most recent Search Console had HTTP: 645 Clicks HTTPS: 2000 clicks.
- Our rank tracker shows a massive drop over 2 days, bottoming out, and then some recovery over the next 3 days.
- HTTP site is showing 500,000 backlinks. HTTPS is showing 23,000 backilinks.
I am planning on resubmitting the old sitemaps today in an attempt to remap our redirects to 301s.
Is this typical? Any ideas?
-
our dev team has requested to 302 initially and then 301 as the final solution. Could this cause a problem for the temporary 302?
-
Looks like you've done a sterling job GWMSEO. Well done!
I deal with a lot of small sites where the decision to move from http to https was made for them... by Shopify (many without them even realising). Some of these sites take months to recover. So, to see recovery within a few weeks is a good result.
Once question I have for you: how have you resolved the backlinks issue (your observation #6)?
What I have observed is that ahrefs doesn't associate the old (http) backlinks with the new version (https). I believe this then impacts backlink profile and subsequently MOZ Domain Authority, which then impacts rankings and traffic.
301 redirects ensure you don't lost the traffic, but it doesn't move the backlinks from http to https.
Nobody has been able to confirm or deny my suspicions yet. So:
- Do you (or anyone in the MOZ community) know if these lost backlinks DOES impact Domain Authority?
- Is there any way to fix it, other than go through all the old backlinks and manually change to https?
Murray
-
Thanks to all for the help. Our rankings are climbing back. We should be back to status quo in +/-2-3 weeks after the move.
-
Nice, good job! I would double check with your CDN provider to make sure implementation was done correctly according to their process. Unless you're saying you discontinued use of the CDN when you switched?
I wouldn't panic, just make sure your team knows that you can't control the rate at which Google re-indexes the website and that it's still early in the process to tell if there is an issue somewhere. Let Google do their thing and then once your traffic and rankings seem more regular, reevaluate. At that point I would add HTTP/2 support if possible and measure the impact from that because that provides some additional benefits such as a boost to site speed.
-
Thanks for the punch list. Our rankings turned around some when we submitted the old http sitemap.
- Images only on HTTP in CDN. HTTPS, No CDN.
- Yes
- Yes. (I was a stickler on this one)
- Yes
- Yes, Yes, Yes.
- Yes
- Yes, we fixed that.
- Yes. Initially our https redirects were 302 (Not on me, LOL.). We resubmitted our old (http) sitemap file today to crawl so that Google can pick up the change.
- Yes
- Yes
- No disavow file. Our backlink profile is remarkably squeaky clean. TF-57, CF-47
Bonus: Yes.
-
1. Are you using a CDN?
2. Did you update all your internal links to https?
3. Did you update all of your canonical tags?
4. Did you update all of your hreflang tags?
5. Are you using plugins/modules from a third party? Are they secure? Do they have documentation or a rep you can contact about migrating to https?
6. Some CMS's have specific settings that need to be altered when migrating - make sure those were done correctly.
7. Use screaming frog to check for any external scripts, and ensure they're calling https.
8. Did you update your old redirects?
9. Did you update your robots.txt file to include the new https sitemap?
10. Did you enable HSTS?
11. Do you have a disavow file? Did you update it for HTTPS?Bonus:
Did you update all of your other paid campaigns, analytics, etc. to reflect the migration? -
OK, that makes a big difference. Before you resubmit any sitemaps, make sure your technical implementation is perfect. Fix all sitemaps, make sure all URLs are properly 301'd, and make sure you are not generating any type of mixed-content security errors. Make sure all sitemaps are going to the new URLs. Most important, when a user clicks on an old URL (e.g., from search results or an old backlink), they need to be 301 redirected to the same page on HTTPS (not the home page). Then resubmit your sitemaps.
Your transition is still very 'young,' and it will likely take 6-8 weeks before Google completely replaces the old site with the new site in it's algorithms and search results. You should expect a temporary drop in traffic during this transition, but assuming you have done everything correctly, things should normalize after that.
-
Tustind:
Sorry - we did it a week ago - 3/14/17.
We just changed the 302s to 301s yesterday. I believe we need to resubmit our old sitemaps for google to index the 301s.
-
So you made this migration over a year ago now? From my knowledge and experience doing a domain change, which has a lot in common with a https change, we experienced about 2 months of depressed traffic, after which point our traffic normalized and then continued on a growth trajectory. So I suspect that your biggest problem was not properly implementing the 301 redirects. You basically told Google that you were only making a temporary change, which could explain why after an entire year your site has still not been fully picked up. When did you change the 302s to 301s?
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
-
Migrated Domain, 90% Drop in Organic Traffic, HELP!!!!
One week ago we migrated our old domain www.nyc-officespace-leader.com to https://www.metro-manhattan.com/. Our organic search traffic from Google has dropped about 90%. Is this normal? If so, how long should it take to recover? We filed a submitted a domain change request on Webmaster tools one week ago. We are noticing that many of the www.nyc-officespace-leader.com pages are still indexed which seems strange after a week. To complicate things, we filed a disavow file on April 9th for spammy links that pointed the NYC site. We filed the identical disavow of those links to the new Metro domain to ensure low quality links don't point to the new domain. Prior to making the domain change request, we migrated 30-40 non critical pages from NYC to Metro domains. Webmaster Tools indicated that the traffic was normal on the migrated pages. We then migrated remaining pages and filed the domain change request on April 4th. It is after April 4th that traffic and ranking declined. I would like to mention that there was no change in content; identical content was migrated from Metro to NYC This does not seem normal. Research prior to the migration indicated that if proper steps were taken it should proceed with limited disruption in traffic and ranking. Any ideas on how to remedy this situation? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Google Indexing Of Pages As HTTPS vs HTTP
We recently updated our site to be mobile optimized. As part of the update, we had also planned on adding SSL security to the site. However, we use an iframe on a lot of our site pages from a third party vendor for real estate listings and that iframe was not SSL friendly and the vendor does not have that solution yet. So, those iframes weren't displaying the content. As a result, we had to shift gears and go back to just being http and not the new https that we were hoping for. However, google seems to have indexed a lot of our pages as https and gives a security error to any visitors. The new site was launched about a week ago and there was code in the htaccess file that was pushing to www and https. I have fixed the htaccess file to no longer have https. My questions is will google "reindex" the site once it recognizes the new htaccess commands in the next couple weeks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vikasnwu1 -
Redirect chains from switch to HTTPS
Hi, We have a client who recently switched their site to https:// The rule to force redirect non-secure URLs to https is in their .htaccess file: RewriteEngine on if non-SSL and one of these, redirect to SSL RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roundabout
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.clientdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] However, they also have simple redirects below this rule that redirect one page to another, such as: Redirect 301 /old.php https://www.clientdomain.com/new.php This is causing redirect chains like this: (A) http://www.clientdomain.com/old.php > (B) https://www.clientdomain.com/old.php > (C) https://www.clientdomain.com/new.php Is there any way to rewrite the rules in .htaccess to get rid of these redirect chains? So that URL A goes directly to URL C? Thank you!1 -
Content Help for Dealers
What type of content would anyone recommend writing for power sports dealers (ATV dealers, Motorcycle Dealers, Jet Ski Dealers, etc) or outdoor power equipment dealers (tractors, lawn mowers, etc) when they're website consists mainly of inventory pages? These dealers are trying to improve brand awareness, but creating content that answers searchers' questions/intent is tough and I want to make sure I am on the right track. I'm trying to create unique content. I am optimizing existing pages and then so far I've been writing brand pages, describing the brands, advertising that they carry this brand, creating links and call-to-actions to the inventory pages,etc. I want to first create authority and crawlable content for this brand. From there, I have been trying to create product category pages, describing the top products under that brand and working to creating product comparison content instead of simply describing it. Why Buy type of stuff, but that gets tricky to make unique. Any suggestions on unique content or better strategies versus just brand descriptions, product descriptions/comparisons, etc? I also want to make sure that creating multiple pages focused on one brand and an overall category isn't cannibalization of a topic. Obviously each page is slightly different and gradually going into more detail, but I want to make sure. Any recommendations on types of content or different strategies would be helpful! Also - I should mention that I am limited by the platform. I cannot create/utilize a blog page or anything like that. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Crichardson19900 -
Help: How to optimize my duplicate category pages
Hi all My category pages will showcase the same products how do I go about optimizing these pages so they don't show up as duplicate content? Would appreciate your all feedaback! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Help needed for a domain
I have a small translation agency in Brazil (this website), totally dependent on SEM. We are in business since 2007, and we were on top position for many relevant keywords until the middle of 2011, when the ranking for the most important keywords started dropping. In that time, we believed that we needed to redesign the old static website and replace it by a new modern one, with fresh content and with weekly updates, which we did, and it's now hosted on Squarespace. I took care to keep the old links working with 301 redirections. When we made the transfer from the static site to Squarespace (Mar/2012, see the attachment), the ranking dropping became even more serious. Today, we have less than 50 unique visitors per day, in a total desperate situation! To make things worse, we received an alert from Google on 23/September/2012 talking about unnatural inbound links, but Google said that "As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole", so we thought we didn't need to worry about. Google was correct, I worked many hours to register our website in web directories, I thought there would be no problem since I was doing this manually. My conclusions are: Something happened prior to Mar/2012 that was making us losing territory. I just don't know what! The migration to Squarespace was a huge mistake. I lost control over the html, and squarespace doesn't do a good job optimizing the pages for SEO. We also were also blasted by Penguin on September, but I believe this is not the main cause of the drop. We were already running very badly at this time. My actions are: a) I generated a DTOX report and I'm trying to clean up the links marked as toxic. That's a hard work! After that I will submit a reconsideration request. b) I'm working on the site: Improving internal link building for relevant keywords Recently I removed a "tag cloud" which I believe was hurting my SEO. Also, I did some redirections that were missing. c) I trying to generate new content to improve link building to my site. d) I'm also considering to stop putting all my coins on this domain, and maybe start a fresh new one. Yes, I'm desperate! 🙂 I would appreciate a lot to hear from you guys, expert people! Thanks a lot, MWcEdPa.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rodrigofreitas0 -
Please help me with your advice
Hi all, Couple years ago I started to build my business based on EMD domain. The intention was to create the source with the rich unique content. After a year of hard work the site achieved top 10 in Google and started to generate good amount of leads. Then Google announced the EMD Update and site lost the 90% of traffic (after Pandas updates our SERP was steady ) “ a new filter that tries to ensure that low-quality sites don’t rise high in Google’s search results simply because they have search terms in their domain names. ” But I don’t consider my site low-quality site, every page, every post is 100% unique and has been created only to share the knowledge with others… The site has EXCELLENT content from industry point of view.... Since the “ EMD Update “ I read hundreds , hundreds of different articles and opinions related to EMD update and finally I am confused and lost. What should I do… • Kill the site and start new one
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal
• Get more links, but what type of links and how I should get them
• Keep hoping and pray....
• Or do something else Please help me with your advice0 -
Do links to Blog articles help that much?
So here's my question/scenario.. When it comes to link-building, I'm noticing a trend that goes like this: If you have a website like www.insurancelondonontario.com and you want to rank highly for the target phrase 'insurance london ontario', you need to get links with that anchor-text pointing to the index page, which is the page you want to rank for that keyword. But what I'm noticing, is that a lot of link builders use a strategy where they create a good piece of content.. like "10 Ways to Decrease your Car Insurance Premiums" within the blog, and then build links to that article since it's easier as it's a good piece of content. My question is.. how much can this really help you to rank for 'insurance london ontario' if all your doing is building links to that blog article, and not the main page? I know it helps the overall domain authority, but is it enough to get you ranking for your goal phrase, or is it just a supporting method?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATMOSMarketing560