Traffic has not recovered from https switch a year ago.
-
I have an ecommerce site that was switched to https a year ago almost to the day. Our category pages are about half of what they were. The redirects were put in properly, and everything in webmaster tools looks good. Anything out there I may not have thought of?
Want to add that the drop is only in Google, Bing stayed just fine.
-
I have read in so many places that it caused a dip for others as well. I had a really bad experience with a site move once so I had a checklist of everything and double and triple checked it, but it has just been a slow decline.
-
We experienced the same thing and I am fairly certain that we did EVERYTHING right. I just think the algorithms are messed a little. I even made a competitor analysis and found that all the websites that did the https move have experienced a major dip in the past. I cannot tie it to the move date, but it is clearly visible on semrush.
I have a feeling that google endorsed this https move because they need the referer data to make their analytics product work better over time, but while this whole web wide move is happening they accept some collateral damage. I even hired consultants and there is no proof anywhere that https is that "positive ranking signal" Matt Cutts vaguely indicated...but then again he said it is a ranking signal and it might as well be a negative ranking signal by that wording. My hunch so far.
-
Hi Cyrus,
1. I believe that pagination is implemented correctly. Is there anything specific you think I should check?
2. Canonicals are in place.
3. The category pages do not have their own introductory text.
4. We have the title tags and descriptions set.
Wanted to also add that we have the correct schema on the pages as well.
-
We've actually seen Google get harsh on category-type pages across a wide number of industries and sites. It's even happened here at Moz. If your HTTPS is implemented correctly (and sounds like you are reasonably certain it is) you might want to look to other areas.
I'd look at your category pages and make sure:
- Pagination is implemented correctly
- Canonical are in place, where appropriate
- If possible, each category should have it's own introductory text, i.e. https://moz.com/ugc/category/link-building
- Basically, do everything you can to treat your category pages like actual landing pages worthy of search traffic, including unique content, value, title tags, descriptions, etc.
-
I don't see where he asked about the site structure, but no it didn't change.
Reporting has not changed, no new filters, we block our company's visits, tracking code is consistent.
-
You didn't answer Dirk's question (above). Has the site structure changed at all?
Has your reporting changed? Added any new filters? Forgot to block your own company's visits from being tracked? Is the tracking code consistent on all pages? (Although it's probably not a reporting problem if, as you say, rankings and sales have also dropped.)
It's good you're doing the audit. Doesn't appear to be an obvious problem.
-
All pages have dipped a little but the category pages seems to have lost the bulk. We have had rankings and sales drops. Canonicals are in correctly and sitemaps have been updated properly.
-
1. The traffic decline wasn't sudden or initially very much. If you look at our traffic it looks like a pyramid with the peak being when we switched to https. It has just been a slow gradual decline every since.
2. The migration was Sept 11 last year, I don't think there was anything that week.
3. User behavior has stayed constant.
4. No spike in errors, the migration went very smooth.
-
Is it just the category pages that have lost traffic? Have rankings and sales also changed significantly? Are canonicals pointing to https? Have sitemaps been updated?
-
Did the traffic drop occur right after the migration to https or a few months/weeks later?
Was the migration close to the date of an algorithm change?
Did you see any change in behaviour of your users after migration (time on page, bounce rate, avg. pages/session,...)?
Was there a spike of errors in WMT after migration or did everything go quite smoothly?
Was it just a migration to https - or did other elements change on the website?
To be very honest - trying to figure out one year after migration what went wrong is an almost impossible task - especially because you don't have access to the WMT data from migration.
The best you can do is to dive deep in to your analytics figures (search traffic) and compare data before/after migration and try to understand what might have had an impact.
rgds,
Dirk
-
I am in the middle of doing an audit to see if I may have missed something. We are fully mobile optimized. Maybe it was a penalty but there has never been a single black hat trick used on the site. Panda hit that month but we have just been on a slow decline for the last year so that it is now 50%. As an ecommerce site I can't think of a scenario where Panda would hit us unless we were doing something we shouldn't have.
-
HTTPS did cause the site speed to slow down a little bit, we knew that was coming so right after launch we did some optimizations so it is now faster with https then before with http.
-
It's impossible to say without seeing the site and, likely, without seeing analytics. What I can tell you is that the issue may not have anything to do with HTTPS. There have been updates to Google's algorithms, and many other things. Mobile optimization has become a huge point, for instance. I would run an audit of your site for both technical and SEO issues to see if those might help.
-
Moving to https could have an impact on your site's perfomance - which may counter the potential benefits of migrating to https. If you compare page load times in Analytics before/after migration - did they go up/down or remained stable?
Dirk
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
-
We are redirecting http and non www versions of our website. Should all versions http (non www version and www version) and https (non www version) should just have 1 redirect to the https www version?
We are redirecting http and non www versions of our website. Should all versions http (non www version and www version) and https (non www version) should just have 1 redirect to the https www version? Thant way all forms of the website are pointing to one version?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Moving from http to https: image duplicate issue?
Hello everyone, We have recently moved our entire website virtualsheetmusic.com from http:// to https:// and now we are facing a question about images. Here is the deal: All webpages URLs are properly redirected to their corresponding https if they are called from former http links. Whereas, due to compatibility issues, all images URLs can be called either via http or https, so that any of the following URLs work without any redirect: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/images/icons/ResponsiveLogo.png https://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/images/icons/ResponsiveLogo.png Please note though that all internal links are relative and not absolute. So, my question is: Can that be a problem from the SEO stand point? In particular: We have thousands of images indexed on Google, mostly images related to our digital sheet music preview image files, and many of them are ranking pretty well in the image pack search results. Could this change be detrimental in some way? Or doesn't make any difference in the eyes of Google? As I wrote above, all internal links are relative, so an image tag like this one: Hasn't changed at all, it is just loaded in a https context. I'll wait for your thoughts on this. Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Recovering from spam links on MY site
Hey guys, Having a weird situation and wondering if anybody can help. I run a sizable WordPress site with a number of content writers. One of the writer's accounts was hacked and was used to post several dozens of complete spam posts with spun content and links to all sorts of shady sites. Recently the site has begun losing rankings on all sorts of pages. There's no manual penalty or anything, but I'm concerned that we're being penalized for having had these links on the site. Of course, as soon as we found the content, we immediately removed it, reset passwords, etc. But a decent number of the pages were indexed. Does anybody have any experience with this or ideas of what to do about it? Is there somewhere we can talk to Google about it or some way to show that we are not part of bad neighborhoods? Thanks so much for any thoughts, Yon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yon230 -
SEO penalty for changing domains by simply switching DNS on Wordpress and adding 301s server-side?
Working on a domain change for a client. They're hosted on Wordpress and their developer wants to simply switch out the DNS for the new domain to point to wordpress, and then have the old domain use 301s to redirect to the new domain. The url structure will be the same, but there will be no CMS connected to the old domain after the switch. Is this dangerous for SEO? A significant portion of their customers are from organic traffic and losing SEO value would be very bad.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dfolwell0 -
Http resolving to https - why isn't it doing that?
Hi everyone I've just been looking at a few https websites and noticed the http urls weren't redirecting to their https equivalents - why would a website owner not bother redirecting? As an example: http://www.marksandspencer.com I look forward to your feedback. L
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Spike then Drop in Direct Traffic?
We've been doing some SEO work over the last few weeks and earlier this week we saw a large spike in traffic. Yay we all thought, but then yesterday the traffic levels returned to pre-celebratory levels. I've been doing some digging to try and find out what was different Monday and Tuesday this week. Mondays are usually big traffic days for us anyway, but this week was by far the biggest, and Tuesday was even higher still, our best day ever. After some poking, I found that the direct traffic followed the same pattern as our overall traffic levels (image attached). The first spike coincides with an email we sent out that day, but the later spike we just don't know where it came from? I understand loosely that direct isn't easily traceable, but can anyone help us understand more about this second spike? Thanks! ayqL2wi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
Leaking organic traffic - how to debug?
Hi all, We've been running an eCommerce marketplace for more than 2.5 years now. Most of our traffic and revenue have been from organic traffic, which have been growing steadily with our inventory and brand, peaking at March this year. From there, we started losing organic traffic (and revenue) each month, at a rate of about 15-20% - for no reason we can understand. In addition, some of our older pages no longer appear in search results (unless we add the name of the site to the search query). We launched a redesign on the end of May, which seemed to initially improve engagement, but didn't affect this trend of lower organic traffic. Our webmaster tools doesn't show anything special - if anything, we made an effort to clean-up every 404 that appears there and other small issues. We did make the following changes very recently, but it did not seem to have a positive effect (so far): We have deep pagination for some categories of the site, and we just added rel=prev,next in the head of every paginated series on the site. We started generating a dynamic sitemap and submitted it to google. For some reason only about a fourth of the pages on the sitemap are indexed. In addition, the "index status" as reported by webmaster tools shows some weird numbers. First, the number there is way bigger than the amount of pages we have - possibly all the combinations of our listing categories and pagination. That number was constant for a while, before taking a deep earlier this year, rising back up and declining again for the last couple of months. Screenshot of the graph What would be the first steps you'd take to understand the core of the problem? we're really at a loss here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | erangalp1 -
Are there any disadvantages of switching from xml sitemaps to .asp sitemaps in GWT
I have been using multiple xml sitemaps for products for over 6 months and they are indexing well with GMT. I have been having this manually amended when a product becomes obsolete or we no longer stock it. I now have the option to automate the sitemaps from a SQL feed but using .asp sitemaps that I would submit the same way in GWT. I'd like your thoughts on the Pro's and cons of this, pluses for me is realtime updates, con's I percieve GMT to prefer xml files. what do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robertrRSwalters0