Website Displayed by Google as Https: when all Secure Content is Blocked - Causing Index Prob.
-
Basically, I have no inbound likes going to https://www.mysite.com , but google is indexing the Homepage only as https://www.mysite.com
In June, I was re included to the google index after receiving a penalty... Most of my site links recovered fairly well. However my homepage did not recover for its top keywords.
Today I notice that when I search for my site, its displayed as https://
Robots.txt blocks all content going to any secure page. Leaving me sort of clueless what I need to do to fix this. Not only does it pose a problem for some users who click, but I think its causing the homepage to have an indexing problem.
Any ideas? Redirect the google bot only? Will a canonical tag fix this?
Thx
-
Yeah, I have all of that in place. I found 1 external link from an https , and 1 on my blog that was just an error one of my employees made. 2 Links total, at least thats what I found. Robots blocking everything you mentioned. My header uses absolute paths.
I do agree with you on one thing, once kicked, the little things that may not have mattered over the past 15 years all the sudden pop up as problems... At the same time I have heard the complete opposite, people are kicked and then they are right back where they used to be a few weeks after being included.
Competitive sabotage is positively happening, unless a random person who happens to live in the same city my competitor is located just went awol and decided they wanted to spam my offsite forums, attempt to hack the website multiple times, and add me to a spam link rink.
Anyway a webmaster says he has changed the canonical on their end to http , although it hasnt changed yet. I'm sure this could take a few days or longer to take place. Hopefully that is the fix, we'll see though and thanks for the advise!
-
Someone could probably have an answer to you within minutes if they had the domain URL available.
RE: Competitive sabotage, I very highly doubt it.
RE: Having just occurred - That is often a sticking-point for no good reason. Do not be concerned so much as to why it wasn't an issue before and focus on how to fix it now. Google's algorithm changes all the time. Your standing in the algorithm changes all the time. Trust can be lost if you get a penalty, even if you get out of it. One external link too many going to https, or one change in the crawl path so Googlebog ends up on the https site via a relative path link... Things can suddenly change for a variety of reasons. However, if you do what is being suggested you are very likely to put this issue behind you.
Here is what I do with eCommerce sites, typically:
- Rel canonical both versions to the http version
- Add a robots.txt block and robots meta noindex tag to shopping cart pages
- Use absolute paths, if possible (e.g. http://www.domain.com/file/ instead of .../file/), especially in your primary navigation and footer links.
If that doesn't work please let us know and we can evaluate the site for you.
Good luck!
-
Hmm, see no major changes have been made to the cart. The website has ranked for 15 years, so the https thing just popped up after the penalty/ re inclusion.
I'm wondering, since the canonical tag was added fairly recently. Do you think I should just fetch the homepage and submit again? Or even add a new page, and fetch/crawl/submit that?
Just to get a fresh crawl? Crawl stats show about 2250 on average daily, so I was expecting this https thing to be gone by now... Regardless of why they chose it to index over my normal link.
thx for the input
-
How about changing all of your links from relative to absolute in the HTML? If they're truly only getting there from navigation internally after visiting the shopping cart, this would solve that, yes? Just a thought.
-
If that is the case, then your shopping cart is not "acting right". Https will exist for every page in your site and it shouldn't. What cart are you using? I would redirect everything outside of the payment, cart, and contact pages to non secure. There is a disconnect from what robots files actually do and what people think they do. They are a suggestion, no index means not to add it to the index, but it does not mean don't go on that page. I have spiders on pages that are blocked from them all of the time.
-
My only concern with doing a redirect is this. The shopping cart is https: , so if you start the checkout process you will enter https:
If person decides to continue shopping... They will stay in the https, but since the checkout page is restricted to bots, essentially https doesnt exist and shouldnt show on any searches.
The sitemaps is clean, and a canonical is in place...
I have been having some issues with a competitor, is it possible they submitted https://www.mysite.com/ version of my website knowing that google will prefer this version?
thx for the advise
-
I would redirect the https version to http. Then I would make sure that there is a cannonical tag in place, next I would go over my site map and make sure that there isn't an link to the https page in there. After that you should be set, I wouldn't put it in the robots.txt though.
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 indexed "Lorem Ipsum" content on an unfinished website
Hi guys. So I recently created a new WordPress site and started developing the homepage. I completely forgot to disallow robots to prevent Google from indexing it and the homepage of my site got quickly indexed with all the Lorem ipsum and some plagiarized content from sites of my competitors. What do I do now? I’m afraid that this might spoil my SEO strategy and devalue my site in the eyes of Google from the very beginning. Should I ask Google to remove the homepage using the removal tool in Google Webmaster Tools and ask it to recrawl the page after adding the unique content? Thank you so much for your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ibis150 -
Best Way to Create SEO Content for Multiple, International Websites
I have a client that has multiple websites for providing to other countries. For instance, they have a .com website for the US (abccompany.com), a .co.uk website for the UK (abccompany.co.uk), a .de website for Germany (abccompany.de), and so on. The have websites for the Netherlands, France, and even China. These all act as separate websites. They have their own addresses, their own content (some duplicated but translated), their own pricing, their own Domain Authority, backlinks, etc. Right now, I write content for the US site. The goal is to write content for long and medium tail keywords. However, the UK site is interested in having myself write content for them as well. The issue I'm having is how can I differentiate the content? And what is the best way to target content for each country? Does it make sense to write separate content for each website to target results in that country? The .com site will still show up in UK web results still fairly high. Does it make sense to just duplicate the content but in a different language or for the specific audience in that country? I guess the biggest question I'm asking is, what is the best way of creating content for multiples countries' search results? I don't want the different websites to compete with each other in a sense nor do I want to spend extra time trying to rank content for multiple sites when I could just focus on trying to rank one for all countries. Any help is appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cody1090 -
My site shows 503 error to Google bot, but can see the site fine. Not indexing in Google. Help
Hi, This site is not indexed on Google at all. http://www.thethreehorseshoespub.co.uk Looking into it, it seems to be giving a 503 error to the google bot. I can see the site I have checked source code Checked robots Did have a sitemap param. but removed it for testing GWMT is showing 'unreachable' if I submit a site map or fetch Any ideas on how to remove this error? Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
My Website Has a Google Penalty, But I Can't Disavow Links
I have a client who has definitely been penalized, rankings dropped for all keywords and hundreds of malicious backlinks when checked with WebMeUp....However, when I run the backlink portfolio on Moz, or any other tool, they don't appear anyone, and all the links are dead when I click on the actual URL. That being said, I can't disavow links that don't exist, and they don't show up in Webmaster Tools, but I KNOW this site has been penalized. Also- I noticed this today (attached). Any suggestions? I've never come across this issue before. xT6JNJC.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 01023450 -
Effects of having both http and https on my website
You are able to view our website as either http and https on all pages. For example: You can type "http://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as http: as you navigate the site. You can also type "https://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as https: as you navigate the site. My question is....if you can view the entire site using either http or https, is this being seen as duplicate content/pages? Does the same hold true with "www.mywebsite.com" and "mywebsite.com"? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rexjoec1 -
Making AJAX called content indexable
Hi, I've read a bit up on making AJAX called content indexable and there seems to be a number of options available, and the recommended methods seems to chaneg with time. My situation is this: On a product pages I have a list of reviews - of which I show the latest 10 reviews. The rest of the reviews are in a paginated format where if the user clicks a "next" button, the next set loads in the same page via AJAX. No ideally I would like all this content indexable as we have hundreds of reviews per product - but at the moment on the latest 10 reviews are indexed. So what is the best / simplest way of getting google to index all these reviews and associate them with this product page? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
Does Google Index Videos onsite when using JQuery?
Hi, I'm showing my videos using jquery lightbox etc. This means that I do not have the normal YouTube "embedding" code onpage. Does anyone know if Google will somehow index my videos? Any solutions / ideas? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Pop Up Pages Being Indexed, Seen As Duplicate Content
I offer users the opportunity to email and embed images from my website. (See this page http://www.andertoons.com/cartoon/6246/ and look under the large image for "Email to a Friend" and "Get Embed HTML" links.) But I'm seeing the ensuing pop-up pages (Ex: http://www.andertoons.com/embed/5231/?KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=370&width=700&modal=true and http://www.andertoons.com/email/6246/?KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=432&width=700&modal=true) showing up in Google. Even worse, I think they're seen as duplicate content. How should I deal with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andertoons0