Help, site traffic has dropped significantly since we changed from http to https
-
Heya, so I am just in charge of the content on the site, and the SEO content, not the actual back-end stuff.
A little under 2 weeks ago we switched to https, and our site traffic has been down a lot ever since. When I SERP check our keywords, they don't seem to have dropped in rankings pages.
Here is what I got when I asked our dev guy if 301 redirects were put in:
I did not add any redirects so all of the content is accessible on both unless individual links get hardcoded one way or the other. The only thing in place is a Cloudflare plugin which rewrites links in cached pages to match the way its accessed, so if for example you access a page over https you don’t get the version cached with a bunch of http links since that will throw up mixed content warnings in the browser. Other than that WP mostly generates all its links to match whatever protocol you are accessing the current page with. We can make specific pages redirect one way or the other in the future if we want to though...
As a startup, site traffic is a metric we track to gouge progress, and so I really need to get to the bottom of if it was the change from http to https that has causes the drop, and if so, what can we do about it?
Also, in case it is relevant: the bounce rate is now sky high (ave. 15% to 64% this last week!)
Any help is very welcome! Site: https://mobileday.com
Thank you!
-
Hi MobileDay! Did these answers help?
-
John gave you some fantastic answers.
He just told you exactly what you need to do a couple things I thought I could share with you.
When adding HTTPS this I found this reference invaluable
https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/the-zen-guide-to-https-configuration/
Then from checking out your existing 301's you are in need of a canonical that everything that is https or http redirects to a secular canonical URL. https://mobileday.com use https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/canonical/ you want the canonical to have the absolute link. Do a search and replace.
|
Like this
NOT
rel="canonical" href="//mobileday.com/" />
|
In order to be sure that you are redirecting properly use
https://varvy.com/tools/redirects/ to check your redirects
then sign up with a free account on
it will continually monitor your robots.txt, Canonicals redirects everything for free it's awesome. the tool displays redirects from www and non-www versions of a url using both http and https.
you definitely need to 301 your site to one canonical URLSEE a bigger photo below and available via the URL herehttp://i.imgur.com/mI7PM6s.png
www
No redirect
Final status code: 200
no www
No redirect
Final status code: 200
www (https)
1 Redirect
https://www.mobileday.com
** 301 redirect**
https://mobileday.com/Final status code: 200
no www (https)
No redirect
Final status code: 200
Here is a reference showing is fairly normal to lose ranking when you add HTTPS hopefully you did contact Google's search console your site should be added there a total of four times and you pick the canonical of the four sites
- http://www.mobileday.com
- http://mobileday.com
- https://mobileday.com <- this is where to point the other 3 urls
- https://www.mobileday.com
You will want to pick your chosen canonical which appears to be https://mobileday.com
Considering you're using cloudflare you can create rewrites as well as 301 redirects inside of the CDN/WAF using page rules
Please keep in mind that when you're setting up the HTTPS:// for the first time using a low time to live or server caching time with cloud flares (HSTS),
https://blog.cloudflare.com/enforce-web-policy-with-hypertext-strict-transport-security-hsts/
is going to keep you from making mistakes that cannot be reverted for whatever the remainder of the value is. Whenever you do set it up in cloud flare I recommend you set it for 24 hours see how it works use this to add your site to browsers https://hstspreload.appspot.com/
- https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168306-Is-there-a-tutorial-for-Page-Rules-
- https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pagerules-url-forwarding/
- https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pagerules-fine-grained-feature-co/
Rule Patterns
A pattern is the definition of what URLs a rule should act on. It can be as simple as a verbatim match, or complex with wildcards. For purposes of Page Rules' patterns a URL can be composed of:
<scheme>://<domain>:<port><path &="" query=""></path></port></domain></scheme>
remember to check everything before making the browsers forward to https automatically and do it for a short time first.
http://web-sniffer.net/
&
https://tools.deepcrawl.co.uk/fetch-as-deepcrawl/
Are great tools for this job so is screaming frog SEO Spider
http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
I sincerely hope I was of help,
Thomas
-
Hi MobileDay -
Well, sounds like you have some issues on your hands! Hopefully I can help sort it out.
First, get those redirects in place! There is no reason for users to be able to access it on both non-secure and secure. If you made the move to implement HTTPS, you want your users there as it helps with trust. Also, you're spreading your link equity. It looks like the search engines are ranking HTTPS, but that also means that the links going to any and all http pages are likely not being counted towards HTTPS. This is likely hurting your longtail traffic, which only you can see in Analytics.
Second, your canonicals are relative and not correct. It's rel="canonical" href="//mobileday.com/" />, which I am surprised to see since you are using Yoast SEO (so I guess you are on Wordpress). A quick way to help fix your duplicate content issues is to a) make those absolute and b) point them to where you want the crawlers to go (I suspect HTTPS).
A canonical is a band-aid though and the search engines do not always respect them. The right fix is a 301.
Also, more things to check:
- Are the URLs in your sitemaps HTTPS or HTTP? They should be the one you want to rank.
- You should declare where your sitemaps are in your robots.txt file (I don't see them here - http://mobileday.com/robots.txt or here - https://mobileday.com/robots.txt)
- I assume you have both HTTP and HTTPS verified in Search Console. Look at if your impressions have dropped on HTTP and see what is going on with HTTPS. This will tell you a lot.
- Regarding bounce rates, what else changed? I wonder if there is an issue with your HTTPS implementation and it's not working correctly on some mobile devices (or desktop browsers). Dig into your Analytics to see which platforms and browsers have a high bounce rate, and solve from there. You should also check to see if it's a specific page type that is bouncing a lot to see if there is an issue with that page type.
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
-
Site move?
What happens in a site move from a subdomain to a new domain and how does that effect the root domain of the subdomain and whether or not the subdomain SEO would be transferred to the new domain?
Web Design | | Jjjay1 -
We're considering making notable changes to our website's navigation. Other than 301 redirects from old pages to new, what do I need to consider with this type of move or update?
We would like to make some navigation changes to our website: www.NetGainIT.com, specifically to the services section. I know that I will need a list of 301 redirects if I do not plan on keeping certain pages, but what else do I need to consider?
Web Design | | NetGainTech0 -
Site is getting crushed by spam traffic and Google Webmaster Tools giving crawl warnings. Also...
Currently hosting a site I'm planning on moving to a new server ASAP, 301 redirecting and have a domain that has nice authority and very old. On the current site I need to clean up the blog. I have a few questions actually.... 1. I'd like to remove most of the blog articles as I want the new site to be very high quality, but isn't it dangerous to do a 301 redirect to the same page for all these articles? 2. I want to focus on the new site as the current site has too many issues but still managing to hang in their. is highly outdated yet I don't want to spend a ton of time on the site before the 301 redirect. With the Pigeon and Panda 4.0 rumors being released soon, I want to get the new site completed ASAP. Do you think it's better if I fix the 3. Would removing cloudflare make things better or worse with the crashing of my site due to high traffic (mainly spam on the blog.) 4. My best article by far is outdated, but should I waste time updating it before redirecting or should I just get the new site going? I did way too many guest posts thinking content is king, but at least checked the outgoing links Domain Auth, Page Auth, and MozTrust in OSE, but first off I'm going to remove a page that mentions I'm looking for guest bloggers. I tried to keep the posts relevant but at the time you could get away with 5. Anything I can do to slow down these spammers on Wordpress? I noticed most of them are checking for vulnerabilities but I'm keeping it up to date, have caching setup. Thanks!
Web Design | | eugenecomputergeeks0 -
Does Google penalise for alot of advertising on your site?
I look after the search side of a decorating website on which we carry a large amount of advertising from external brands as that is our business model. Do you know if we would get penalised for having too much advertising - would it be deemed to affect the user experience? Many thanks for your help on this.
Web Design | | Pday0 -
Does Using Magento With Multi Sites Affect SEO
We have a client who has 3 separate websites targeting the US, Australia, and the UK. Each of them has relevant ccTLD's such as: .com .com.au and .co.uk. Our client wants to use the Magento multi-site function so it combines all the stores (which are the exact same products) and merge it into one through Magento. These sites are all hosted in the US and had nothing to do with me haha! I understand Rand has mentioned on a video it would be best having the websites with ccTLD's hosted in that country (if budget permits), however in this case the budget doesn't permit us to go down that road. Has anyone any advice on this matter, has anyone did this before and had a lot of success with the SEO? At present there doesn't seem to be a lot of information about it and opinions are varied and sometimes divided. Any help would be very much appreciated guys Thanks, Matt
Web Design | | HigherthanSEO0 -
How can we improve our e-commerce site architecture to help best preserve Page Authority?
Today I installed the SEOMoz toolbar for Firefox (very cool, highly recommended). I was comparing our site http://www.ccisolutions.com to this competitor: http://www.uniquesquared.com For the most part, the deeper I go in our site the more the page authority drops. We have a few exceptions where the page authority of a subcategory page is actually better than the cat. page one level up. In comparison, when I was looking at http://www.uniquesquared.com I noticed that their page authority stays at "21" on every single category page I visit. Are you seeing what I'm seeing? Is this potentially a problem with the tool bar or, is there something significantly different about their site architecture that allows them to maintain that PA across all category and sub category pages? Is there something fundamentally wrong with our (http://www.ccisolutions.com) site architecture? I understand that we have longer URLs, but this is an old store with a lot of SKUs, so we have decided not to remove the /category/ and /product/ from the URLs because the 301 redirects that would result wouldn't pass all of the authority they've built up over the years. Interested to know viewpoints on the site architecture and how it might be improved. Thanks!
Web Design | | danatanseo0 -
Bar Codes for Event Sites
A client is requesting bar codes for simple tracking of event attendees. Their need is to be able to verify at the door someone has registered and then have that data link to the registrant to show who did/did not attend, etc. We looked at QR code solutions (seems bar code makes more sense at this point) and now are at a point where we need input from any who have experience with either system and could potentially make a recommendation. A person would sign up for this once a year event (no charge, informational) on the site and be able to print off their registration ticket to bring to the event. If it could also be downloaded to iPhone/Android that would be a plus as well. When they come through the door the code is scanned and registrant is in. Simple. They currently keep a database of past attendees and only use it for general area the attendees are from and how many show over time, etc. Since we do not want to reinvent the wheel, we were hoping a mozzer might have insight. thanks, Robert
Web Design | | RobertFisher0 -
Best Site navigation solution
Hi there, We are getting our website redesigned and would like to know whether to increase the links on our site wide navigation or not. At the moment we have around 30 links from the navigation. We want to use exploding navigation menu and increase the links to our most important categories. Say if we increase to 60-70 would that be alright. (what will be the highest we can go for) At the moment categories that get links from navigation are ranking pretty good. If we increase would we loose those rankings. What will be the pros and cons of increasing navigation links? Second question we are also adding fooer links to top 10 categories in the footer. Would this be ok as far as seo and google concerned. Many Thanks
Web Design | | Jvalops0