Does anyone know if an increase in 804 HTTPS errors will affect SEO rankings?
-
We recently moved our whole site over from HTTP to HTTPS and we went from having 106 keywords in the top 3 positions to 80 in just one week. The only thing that I can think of that caused the drop is the HTTPS changes to our site. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
-
Jennifer,
Some of your pages still reference http images - example https://www.tsheets.com/proadvisors-we-trust.php calls image http://cdn.tsheets.com/images/pros/denise-loter-koch.png
"Your connection to www.tsheets.com is encrypted with obsolete cryptography. However, this page includes other resources which are not secure. These resources can be viewed by others while in transit, and can be modified by an attacker to change the look of the page."
This is probably the reason for the 804 errors in Moz.
You should also check your internal links - some of them still point to the http version which is then again redirected to the https version
Example https://www.tsheets.com/infographics/time-tracking-infographic-hr-industry links to http://www.tsheets.com/infographics/time-tracking-infographic which is then redirected to https.
Unrelated to the https - but you might want to optimise the image on https://www.tsheets.com/online-invoicing-and-billing/ (https://www.tsheets.com/online-invoicing-and-billing/images/main-image-billing.png)
rgds
Dirk
-
This is very helpful. Thank you Dirk.
Just for clarification our site is https://www.tsheets.com
-
Hi Jennifer,
Migration to https has certain risks (like any other migration of your site). Without the actual url it's difficult to asses what's wrong with the site.
1. You can check here if the SSL was properly implemented: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/
2. There is an interesting article on the technical migration on the site of Yoast (https://yoast.com/move-website-https-ssl/) - and about the potential SEO impacts here: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl - even if you have already migrated you could check the different steps & check if you have skipped one.
3. Try crawling the site with Screaming Frog - it has a tab Protocol that can show you if all pages are on https or if some are missing. You can also check if all your internal links are updated to the https version.
4. I guess you have created a WMT for https version of your site - check if specific errors are listed.
5. Check pagespeed with google page speed analyser & webpagetest.org - check your scores. It possible that adding the https also made your site slower.
6. Sample pages in different browsers - do you get security warnings when visiting pages. These messages can really frighten your visitors, and have impact on stats like bounce rate & avg. visit duration, and as result have an impact on your rankings
7. Check vital stats in Analytics - like bounce rate, pages/visit, avg visit duration, avg time on page... - did you see major changes after migration. Also check if you see an increase in 404 pages.
Hope this helps in solving your problem,
Dirk
-
Hi Jennifer
Take a look at the questions and answers here as this has been discussed and referenced a resource I would have posted.
http://moz.com/community/q/804-https-ssl-error
If crawlers see issues with your servers and protocol, that could potentially be a negative checkmark against your site in the SERPS. I would discuss with your web dev and SEO team how to properly implement changes to fix these issues.
Hope this helps! Good luck.
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
-
HTTPS for form pages?
I am creating a small business website for a friend in Recruitment. It’s very small and mainly just a shop window for the business. There’s no login area for the website, but there are two areas were users can enter information: General contact us form (giving email and phone number) Applying for a job (attaching a resume) The forms are using Ninja Forms – which I believe are secure in passing information. But am I missing anything? Do I need to make these pages https at all? I’m quite new to building sites from scratch. Thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | joberts0 -
Personalization software and SEO
Hi guys, I'm just testing a personalization software in our website, basically changing the "location" text depending on the user's IP. I can see in my software that when the Google bot comes to our site the personalization software triggers an action changing the location based text to "California". Can this make Google understand that our website targets only users in California and thereof hurt our rankings in other locations nationwide? I'll appreciate your opinions.
Technical SEO | | anagentile1 -
Coming soon SEO
Hi, I was wondering what is the best practice to redirect all the links juice by redirecting all the pages of your website to a coming soon page. The coming soon page will point to the domain.com, not to a subfolder. Should I move the entire website to a subfolder and redirect this folder to the coming soon page? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bigrat950 -
Not ranking on Google
Hi all, I am optimising a site which is a hotel directory for a small island in the Mediterranean - Malta. The site is www.maltahotelsonline.com. I did a keyword research and optimised the page. However I am now at link building stage. Since we do not have many links the site is still not ranking very well for the desired keywords (ranking fine on Bing and Yahoo yet not on Google). As a result there isn't much traffic on the site. 1. Is there any particular issue that you can spot on this site that is not allowing it to rank well on Google? 2. Any suggestions on link-building please?
Technical SEO | | ICON_Malta0 -
Not ranking well in Google
Hi, I am new to Seomoz,I have some little doubts regarding <title>tag.</p> <p>Can i target 3 words in the title tag. Currently i am on top for one keyword, and i cant get the rest two in top positions. Here is my website, can anyone review my site please.</p> <p>xxx(dot)ridpiles(dot)com with keyword hemorrhoids treatment</p> <p>I have good amount of backlinks, but still something i am missing. I have 100% unique content.</p> <p> </p> <p>Regards</p></title>
Technical SEO | | Dexter22387874870 -
PR Ranks
Do they really have a lot of value on how a site performs on Google? What is the best way to raise your PR Rank?
Technical SEO | | CalgaryRealtor390 -
Crawl Errors
Okay, I was just in my Google Webmaster Tools and was looking at some of the stats. I have 1354 "not found" pages google says. Many of these URL's are bizarre. I don't know what they are. Others I do know. What should I do about this? Especially all the URL's I don't even know what they are?
Technical SEO | | azguy0 -
How do you know when to upgrade hosting to VPS or Dedicated Server from an SEO perspective?
From an SEO perspective, how do you know when to upgrade web hosting to VPS or Dedicated Server? Added: We have a Dedicated IP Address and plenty of bandwidth and disk space. We've done a lot of work on page speed. What we don't need is slow-downs due to the sharing space. Our business is seasonal with much higher traffic for three months of the year. I'm leaning towards moving it up a notch. What is the next level after this? And yes, our web host just confirmed that some of the things I want to implement can't be done because we are on a shared server. He recommended going to Dedicated Hosting. And finally: If we want to be absolutely positive that shared hosting problems won't affect us, and to customize, and also to increase speed, dedicated server seems to be the way to go?
Technical SEO | | zharriet0