Drupal, http/https, canonicals and Google Search Console
-
I’m fairly new in an in-house role and am currently rooting around our Drupal website to improve it as a whole. Right now on my radar is our use of http / https, canonicals, and our use of Google Search Console. Initial issues noticed:
- We serve http and https versions of all our pages
- Our canonical tags just refer back to the URL it sits on (apparently a default Drupal thing, which is not much use)
- We don’t actually have https properties added in Search Console/GA
I’ve spoken with our IT agency who migrated our old site to the current site, who have recommended forcing all pages to https and setting canonicals to all https pages, which is fine in theory, but I don’t think it’s as simple as this, right? An old Moz post I found talked about running into issues with images/CSS/javascript referencing http – is there anything else to consider, especially from an SEO perspective?
I’m assuming that the appropriate certificates are in place, as the secure version of the site works perfectly well.
And on the last point – am I safe to assume we have just never tracked any traffic for the secure version of the site?
Thanks
John
-
OK I gotcha now. You can submit the sitemap in all versions of Search Console, won't hurt anything to have it referenced in multiple profiles of SC.
Another thing you can do to make sure crawlers find your XML is add this line to your robots.txt file:
Sitemap: http://yoursitecom/sitemap.xml
-
Thanks so much, this is so helpful!
About the search console question, I may have confused you. This is what I mean: I have a www and non-www property of the website in Search Console (from before my time), which looks like this:
|
property
|
Sitemap
|
http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml
|
NO SITEMAP LINKED
|
(apologies that has not formatted well, I hope you can decipher!)
With a sitemap linked to the www version and nothing to the non-www version. The sitemap is located on the non-www version of the site, so I was just wondering if the above scenario has essentially meant we've had no sitemap submissions to date (that said, the sitemap appears to be pulling through despite being the "wrong" address, so I can only think there are either 2 separate sitemap files, OR the redirect we have set from www to non-www is having an effect?)
-
Hi John, always glad to help!
For your Search Console question: When you get the redirects setup and have committed to your site being all HTTPS, you'll want to move the location of your XML sitemap to https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. As Cyrus mentions in that article, don't update the URLs in the sitemap yet, let search engines hit them as non-secure for a while, I think he recommends 30 days, to give them a chance to learn your new protocol and for them to hit your redirects multiple times.
For your www question: There's no difference in SEO-value whether you choose www or non-www, simply a preference. The only thing that matters here is that you pick one and stick with it.
For your GA question: That is correct, you are seeing traffic from both in GA. GA will collect and report on any page/URL/website that your UA-ID is on. If someone scraped your site and took the GA script with it, you'd start seeing their traffic in your reporting view (that's why appending hostname is always a good idea ). You can specify in the View Settings of GA what your protocol is.
-
Hi Logan,
Thanks for your quick response, that’s very helpful and the article you provided is great.
I hadn’t thought of the purpose of self-referring canonicals, thanks for clarifying.
Re: Search Console: I’ve just noticed we only have a sitemap linked for the http://www property. Currently, all www. traffic is redirected to the non-www version of any given page (forgetting https for a second). Is this an issue in terms of pagerank?
And my last question, I promise! If our UA tag is firing on both http and https versions of the site, should we be seeing traffic from both in GA, if the property/view default url is set to http:// ? By my understanding, that setting is just a vanity thing for reporting purposes, but I’m not sure where, if anywhere, I need to specify in a particular view that http:// and https:// traffic should be treated as the same thing?
-
Hi John,
For the most part, your IT partner is correct, 2 of the most important things are to 301 all HTTP requests to HTTPS and to update canonicals. I often refer to people with questions about HTTPS to this post written by Cyrus Shepard, he covers all the bases needed for an SEO-friendly secure migration: https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl.
Regarding your specific comments:
- We serve http and https versions of all our pages - A 301 redirect rule will correct this
- Our canonical tags just refer back to the URL it sits on (apparently a default Drupal thing, which is not much use) - Self-referring canonicals like this serve plenty of purpose, they just need to match your preferred version www/non-www http/https, etc. etc. Self-referring canonicals help prevent duplicates caused by parameters, case-sensitive URLs, and the aformentioned HTTP/S and www/non-www.
- We don’t actually have https properties added in Search Console/GA - You should add another profile for HTTPS, verification should be simple since you've already proven you're the site owner. You want to have both profiles in GSC so you can monitor the shift of indexed URLs from HTTP to HTTPS. Also good for future troubleshooting should you see and issue with indexing of HTTP in the future for some reason.
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
-
Issues with Google Search Console and rekeyed SSL certificate
Hi, Another newbie question please. I've recently changed the name of my business so bought a new domain and rekeyed the SSL certificate to the new domain. Let's say the old domain was called https://123.com and the new one is https://abc.com. I've set up a 301 redirect on 123.com to forward to abc.com and I've added the new domain to Google Search Console and verified it, however can't seem to use the Change of Address tool to move from the old domain to the new domain. I think its because my preferred property (https://123.com) technically no longer exists since I rekeyed the SSL certificate from the old site to the new one so the old site no longer has an SSL certificate. When I go to the old https domain it doesn't load, nor does it seem to forward to the new site. It just times out. Am I correct in assuming that since I rekeyed the SSL certificate, that my original preferred property on Google (https://123.com) no longer exists? And if so, is there a way to use the Change of Address tool or do I simply need to remove the old site from Google and go through a period where my (new) site builds it's ranking from scratch? Thanks in advance folks!
Technical SEO | | Veevlimike0 -
Working out whether a site is http and https
Hi there, I can access the following site with http and https making me think that there will be a duplicate content issue. How can I work out if this is the case? http://ionadebarge.com https://ionadebarge.com Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Bee1591 -
Search Console - Should I request to index redirected URL or Mark as fixed?
Hi all, Many blog posts used to be showing 404s when doing crawl tests and in search console (despite being there when visited.) I realized it was an issue with URL structure. It used to be example.com/post-name I've fixed the issue by changing the URL structure in Wordpress so that they now follow the structure of example.com/post-type/post-name According to sitemaps, Google has now indexed all posts in /post-type/post-name. My question is what to do with crawl errors in Search Console that are still there for example.com/postname. When I fetch, I get a redirect status (which is accurate). At this point should I request to index or mark as fixed? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | MouthyPR0 -
404 or rel="canonical" for empty search results?
We have search on our site, using the URL, so we might have: example.com/location-1/service-1, or example.com/location-2/service-2. Since we're a directory we want these pages to rank. Sometimes, there are no search results for a particular location/service combo, and when that happens we show an advanced search form that lets the user choose another location, or expand the search area, or otherwise help themselves. However, that search form still appears at the URL example.com/location/service - so there are several location/service combos on our website that show that particular form, leading to duplicate content issues. We may have search results to display on these pages in the future, so we want to keep them around, and would like Google to look at them and even index them if that happens, so what's the best option here? Should we rel="canonical" the page to the example.com/search (where the search form usually resides)? Should we serve the search form page with an HTTP 404 header? Something else? I look forward to the discussion.
Technical SEO | | 4RS_John1 -
Does http://my.dudamobile.com/ Effect SEO
Hi, Hope everyone is enjoying the new year! I was wondering if converting your desk top website to a mobile one, example via http://my.dudamobile.com/, has any negative effects on SEO. Did it effect your site? Do you recommend doing it? Does it effect links? When people link to your desk top URL does that authority carry to the mobile, or would it be better if they link to the mobile (m.website.com) URL? Is http://my.dudamobile.com/ a good choice? Any feedback, as always, is greatly appreciated! Thanks Jimmy
Technical SEO | | jimmy02250 -
Why is my site jumping around in google search ?
Hi I've been trying to get my page up in google results and I was wondering why the constant fluctuation. For example, on one day the pages is nr. 26, the next day it's nr. 65 then jumps back on say 30 and then in a few more days it's going back to 50. What's the logic behind that ? Thanks Cezar
Technical SEO | | sparts1 -
Why isn't Google pushing my Schema data to the search results page
I believe we have it set up right. I'm noticing all my competitors schema data is showing up which is really giving them a leg up on us. We have a high ranking website so I'm just not sure why it's now showing up. Here is an example URL http://www.airgundepot.com/3576w.html I've used the Google webmaster tools tester and it all looks fine. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | AirgunDepot0 -
Why Google not picking My META Description? Google itself populate the description.. How to control this Search Snippets??
Why Google not picking My META Description? Google itself populate the description.. How to control this Search Snippets??
Technical SEO | | greyniumseo0