Switching from HTTP to HTTPS and google webmaster
-
HI,
I've recently moved one of my sites www.thegoldregister.co.uk to https. I'm using wordpress and put in the permanent 301 redirect for all pages to false https for all pages in the htaaccess file. I've updated the settings in google analytics to https for the original site. All seems to be working well.
Regarding the google webmaster tools and what needs to be done. I'm very confused by the google documentation on this subject around https. Does all my crawl data and indexing from http site still stand and be inherited by the https version because of the redirects in place. I'm really worried I will lose all of this indexing data, I looked at the "change of address" in the settings of webmaster, but this seems to refer to changing the actual domain name rather than the protocol which i haven't at all.
I've also tried adding the https version to the console as well, but the https version is showing a severe warning "is robots.txt blocking some important pages". I don't understand this error as it's the same version and file as the http site being generated by all in one seo pack for wordpress (see below at bottom). The warning is against line 5 saying it will ignore it. What i don't understand is i don't get this error in the webmaster console with the http version which is the same file??
Any help and advice would be much appreciated.
Kind regards
Steve
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /xmlrpc.php
Crawl-delay: 10 -
Hi Steve! If Peter and Kristen answered your question, make sure to mark their responses as "Good Answers."
-
You have few more things to do:
-
change redirect from 302 to 301 between HTTP and HTTPS sites
-
you need to verify in SearchConsole HTTPS site too and then do "change of address". Change of address can be used also if you switch protocols.
-
you need to change in your pages - canonical, assets, images so everything to point to HTTPS pages/elements. Also internal linking should be only to HTTPS pages. I check 2-3 pages of your site and they're still pointing to HTTP. This give bots wrong signal.
-
setup HSTS header. This will prevent browsers/bots to visit anymore HTTP site for one year:
Header always set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=63072000; includeSubdomains; preload" put this in .htaccess
-
about errors.txt I think that it's much better if you enable indexing at all. Here is example of mine site:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://peter.nikolow.me/sitemap_index.xmlas you can see i enable bot to crawl everything within WordPress folders.
Current you make half moving to HTTPS and this sent to bots wrong signals because site isn't moved proper. Fix everything to avoid wasting of crawling budget.
-
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
-
Changing Domains - 301 old https to new https
Brief History: Our company made change to a new domain. Both domains had an SSL configured on it in which the old domain SSL was controlled and created by Shopify which gave us limited control. Because we couldn't redirect the old https:// to the new https:// So basically we duplicated our new HTML website and put canonical ref on all duplicate pages to the final domain to help get search to navigate to the newer domain. Question: In the near future I would like to take down the old domain and do a 301 domain forwarding. What is the correct course of action to complete this? Our old domain was indexed and SERP results were tied to it's https:// url's.
Technical SEO | | bnewt1 -
Switching to HTTPS from HTTP
Hi, I have switched my website from http to https but now I my facing a problem when I type URL with www ( e.g https://www.example.com) in browser that is working fine but when I type URL without www like https://example.com "This connection is untrusted" error is showing . All I want to is redirect https://example.com to https://www.example.com. Please let me know how can I redirect? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Alick3000 -
My sites just disappeared from google last night. there is no manual action in webmaster.
can it the penalty if so how do i find out if i was hit with a penalty i keep checking my webmasters but there is no alert for penalty. this is very sad but once i make sure it was a penalty i can move on for a safer seo. Sites are indexed i checked. there is no other indexing issue or robots issue either. Please help
Technical SEO | | samafaq0 -
Google Places, Google Plus, Oh my!
Ok - So I am in the position to try and clean up the current Google places nightmare for a company. Right now there is about 3 or 4 different google places listings for them that they have no control over. So here is what I did: 1. I took control of them all by verifying via phone and confirmed all of them. 2. I suspended all the listings but 1 3. I edited the one listing to be accurate and complete.
Technical SEO | | DylanPKI
Then I waited, and waited... A month later, the old listings are still up and none of the changes to the one listing have been made. Today it gets a bit more complicated. Today I created a Google+ page for the business which seems like it may end up adding yet ANOTHER Google Places listing, is that correct? They are sending a post card to verify, but I have the page all set up ready to go and plan on tying it to the website. I am not exactly sure what my specific question is, but I am looking for any advice anyone has on the best way to go about this situation. Thank you in advance!0 -
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 -
Unexplained spikes in Google Analytics
My site has modest traffic (50 unique visitors per day). In the past week, I've seen two unexplained spikes in my Google Analytics. Yesterday, there were 140 unique visitors, and these unique visitors each visited one unique page. This appears to be a bot of some sort. If this is a bot, why does Google Analytics think these are unique visitors? Is there a was for small sites to deal with this? Best,
Technical SEO | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
Google support eTag?
Hello~ People! I have a questions regarding eTag. I know Google support If-Modified-HTTP-Header aka last modified header. I used eTag instead of last modified header. It seems like Google does support, yet here is my questions. code.google suggest as following. GData-Version: 2.0
Technical SEO | | Artience
ETag: "C0QBRXcycSp7ImA9WxRVFUk." but I used etag as following . ETag: "10cd712-eaae-b279a480" I didnt include "GData-Version: 2.0". is this mean Google may not support my etag?0 -
Magento - Google Webmaster Crawl Errors
Hi guys, Started my free trial - very impressed - just thought I'd ask a question or two while I can. I've set up the website for http://www.worldofbooks.com (large bookseller in the UK), using Magento. I'm getting a huge amount of not found crawl errors (27,808), I think this is due to URL rewrites, all the errors are in this format (non search friendly): http://www.worldofbooks.com/search_inventory.php?search_text=&category=&tag=Ure&gift_code=&dd_sort_by=price_desc&dd_records_per_page=40&dd_page_number=1 As oppose to this format: http://www.worldofbooks.com/arts-books/history-of-art-design-styles/the-art-book-by-phaidon.html (the re-written URL). This doesn't seem to really be affecting our rankings, we targeted 'cheap books' and 'bargain books' heavily - we're up to 2nd for Cheap Books and 3rd for Bargain Books. So my question is - are these large amount of Crawl errors cause for concern or is it something that will work itself out? And secondly - if it is cause for concern will it be affecting our rankings negatively in any way and what could we do to resolve this issue? Any points in the right direction much appreciated. If you need any more clarification regarding any points I've raised just let me know. Benjamin Edwards
Technical SEO | | Benj250