Https Homepage Redirect & Issue with Googlebot Access
-
Hi All,
I have a question about Google correctly accessing a site that has a 301 redirect to https on the homepage. Here’s an overview of the situation and I’d really appreciate any insight from the community on what the issue might be:
Background Info:
My homepage is set up as a 301 redirect to a https version of the homepage (some users log in so we need the SSL). Only 2 pages on the site are under SSL and the rest of the site is http.We switched to the SSL in July but have not seen any change in our rankings despite efforts increasing backlinks and out put of content.
Even though Google has indexed the SSL page of the site, it appears that it is not linking up the SSL page with the rest of the site in its search and tracking. Why do we think this is the case?
The Diagnosis:
1) When we do a Google Fetch on our http homepage, it appears that Google is only reading the 301 redirect instructions (as shown below) and is not finding its way over to the SSL page which has all the correct Page Title and meta information.
<code>HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Date: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 17:26:24 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.16 (Debian) Location: https://mysite.com/ Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length: 242 Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 <title>301 Moved Permanently</title> # Moved Permanently The document has moved [here](https://mysite.com/). * * * <address>Apache/2.2.16 (Debian) Server at mysite.com</address></code>
2) When we view a list of external backlinks to our homepage, it appears that the backlinks that have been built after we switched to the SSL homepage have been separated from the backlinks built before the SSL.
Even on Open Site, we are only seeing the backlinks that were achieved before we switched to the SSL and not getting to track any backlinks that have been added after the SSL switch. This leads up to believe that the new links are not adding any value to our search rankings.
3) When viewing Google Webmaster, we are receiving no information about our homepage, only all the non-https pages. I added a https account to Google Webmaster and in that version we ONLY receive the information about our homepage (and the other ssl page on the site)
What Is The Problem?
My concern is that we need to do something specific with our sitemap or with the 301 redirect itself in order for Google to read the whole site as one entity and receive the reporting/backlinks as one site.
Again, google is indexing all of our pages but it seems to be doing so in a disjointed way that is breaking down link juice and value being built up by our SSL homepage.
Can anybody help? Thank you for any advice input you might be able to offer.
-Greg
-
Thanks for taking a look anyway Chris.
Does anybody else have any suggestions on what might be going on here?
Cheers,
Greg
-
That appears normal. Sorry, I can't be of any help on this.
-
Hey Chris,
Yeah - not sure why it ended up being displayed like that. Here's a screen shot of it again (this is the Google Fetch result that we receive when we Google Fetch on our http homepage - in our main webmaster account): http://tinypic.com/r/2vnkz9h/5
-
That's a weird looking redirect--I wouldn't expect to see any html in the server headers . It kind of looks like the data you provided its being take from information directly on the page verses being provided by the server. Are you sure your redirect is set up correctly on the server?
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
-
Recovering from an open redirect
From a previous company we have inherited a domain which once contained an open redirect redirect.magnet.me. Even though this domain has been returning a 410 for every single request directed at it for the last few months, we continue to see new links popping up in Google which refer to this domain https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=%22redirect.magnet.me%22 Currently we just keep disavowing these links, but at the same time they keep appearing in our Moz.com tooling, being unable to disavow those links here. Does anybody have any successful tips how to deal with this scenario, compared to only disavow new links after the fact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rogier_slag0 -
Too many redirects Homepage Problem
During a site move, a sub domain of website a redirected all pages to the homepage of website b. resulting a homepage algorithmic penalty for website b. The sub domain was deleted - and the sitemove for the main domain went through ok. However website b has 80,000 incoming links from the sub domain of website a. is there anything else that needs to be done to "inform" google that the mistake was fixed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FusionMediaLimited1 -
SEO issues with Magento
Hi Everyone, We use Magento CMS for our site and we are having a frustrating time resolving our SEO issues. The site was very poorly managed in years past and in the past year I have redesigned and cleaned up many things. However we are recently having trouble with indexing and keyword ranking. Issue #1: Our main keyword ranking has dropped quite a bit while our other less important keywords have steadily risen. I suspect a very strict robots.txt implemented back in early January may have been the culprit. We have since been modifying it with out much luck. Many of our pages are still blocked. 12/05/12 : ranked 12th 1/09/13: ranked 19th 1/16/13: ranked 35th Now: out of top 50 (52nd) Issue #2: Not a single image is being indexed. We are 0 for 582 according to Webmaster tools. Not sure why... Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated as I have great determination and interest in learning the correct way to fix/do this. Site: www.scojo.com Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | t_parrish0 -
Why is SEO Moz only crawling my homepage?
When I send the SEO Bot to crawl my website, it only crawls the homepage? Does anyone know why this is happening? Thanks, Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisCurdDesign0 -
Warning about a 302 redirect
Hello everyone, I'm testing the pro software and recently I installed an SSL Certificate on one of the websites I'm monitoring, I put in place an .htaccess directive to force all traffic to the secure version of the site (https) and I noticed how this raised a warning because my directive is forcing the traffic with a 302 redirect. These are the lines: _RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80 _ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://example.com/$1 [R,L] I understand that this is not good so I figured since I'm already redirecting all www to -www I can force traffic that arrives trying to use www to the secure version like so: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example.com$ RewriteRule (.*) https://example.com/$1 [R=301,L] But this is not 100% effective because if someone visits the site directly on the -www version this person wont get redirected hence it wont be forced to see the https. So my question is: does anybody know of an alternate way to force traffic to the secure socket using a 301 instead of a 302? Oh boy, just by writing the question I think I may have figured it out, I'll post it anyways because (1) I could be wrong and (2) It could help someone else. It just hit me but the directive that is forcing www to -www specifies what type of redirect to do here [R=301,L]. So to try to answer my own question before even posting it this could probably do the trick: _RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80 _ _RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://example.com/$1 [_R=301,R,L] I'll be testing it out ASAP and again I'll post the question anyways just in case it doesn't work, in case someone has a good suggestion or to help someone that could be in the same situation. If this is turns out right I will need someone to slap me in the face 😐
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevenpicado0 -
How to Redirect
What is the htaccess code to redirect everything in a directory to a file? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Canonicalization issue I cant work out
Seo Moz have kindly brought to my attention some canonicalization issues with my site. Firstly I've adjust http://capitalalist.com to 301 redirect to http://www.capitalalist.com via htaccess. But the crawl has shown for every page in my site the problem below: http://www.capitalalist.com/cirque-du-soir http://www.capitalalist.com/cirque-du-soir/ It's just that last / that's causing the problem. But I can't seem to see anyone having the same issue before. BTW im using wordpress if that makes a difference. Can anyone elaborate on the issue? How would i adjust my htaccess file to redirect a request with a / on the end of it? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdenBrands0 -
How to resolve Duplicate Page Content issue for root domain & index.html?
SEOMoz returns a Duplicate Page Content error for a website's index page, with both domain.com and domain.com/index.html isted seperately. We had a rewrite in the htacess file, but for some reason this has not had an impact and we have since removed it. What's the best way (in an HTML website) to ensure all index.html links are automatically redirected to the root domain and these aren't seen as two separate pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ContentWriterMicky0