Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Redirecting HTTP to HTTPS - How long does it take Google to re-index the site?
-
hello Moz
We know that this year, Moz changed its domain to moz.com from www.seomoz.org
however, when you type "site:seomoz.org" you still can find old urls indexed on Google (on page 7 and above)We also changed our site from http://www.example.com to https://www.example.com
And Google is indexing both sites even though we did proper 301 redirection via htaccess.- How long would it take Google to refresh the index? We just don't worry about it?
- Say we redirected our entire site. What is going to happen to those websites that copied and pasted our content? We have already DMCAed their webpages, but making our site https would mean that their website is now more original than our site? Thus, Google assumes that we have copied their site? (Google is very slow on responding to our DMCA complaint)
Thank you in advance for your reply.
-
Unfortunately, the answer is "it depends".
I do have some recent experience with this for 2 very small sites (one has around 300 indexed URL, the other has around 70), which you may find useful.
In each case, it took just a day or two to get the most important URLs (best rankings, traffic, link authority, etc.) swapped in for their non-https counterparts. However, deeper URLs with little link authority took up to 90 days to be swapped out.
If your most important URLs don't get swapped out in a week or so, I would check these things:
- Make sure you've updated internal links so that they point to the https URLs. You don't want to pass your link authority through 301s anyways.
- Make sure all versions of the site are verified in GWT, setting the https version as the preferred version.
- Make sure your sitemaps (XML and HTML) contain the https versions of your URLs
- Make sure that the https URLs do not have the non-https URL's set as the canonical version.
Hope this helps and good luck!
-
Google is super fast when it comes to the main, most important stuff on your domain. It's still indexing stuff from the old SEOmoz.org domain because we have a ton of pages! and frankly, some of them aren't very popular. We also made the decision not to redirect every single page and killed a ton of them. The less popular pages are lingering (though with the right 301 redirects, we're still getting that traffic to the still important to us pages) with SEOmoz.org, either waiting to be indexed at Moz.com or tossed out as they no longer exist.
For dealing with people who are scraping your site, make sure you have canonical tags implemented on your pages for your shiny new https site. Most scrapers steal the code, so they grab those too.
-
Hi there,
Google says in their guidelines: The time it takes Googlebot and our systems to discover and process all URLs in the site move depends on how fast your servers are and how many URLs are involved. As a general rule, a medium-sized website can take a few weeks for most pages to move, and larger sites take longer. The speed at which Googlebot and our systems discover and process moved URLs depends the number of URLs and the server speed.
You can find out all the information here https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033080?hl=en
Hope it helps you.
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
-
Google is indexing bad URLS
Hi All, The site I am working on is built on Wordpress. The plugin Revolution Slider was downloaded. While no longer utilized, it still remained on the site for some time. This plugin began creating hundreds of URLs containing nothing but code on the page. I noticed these URLs were being indexed by Google. The URLs follow the structure: www.mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/revslider/templates/this-part-changes/ I have done the following to prevent these URLs from being created & indexed: 1. Added a directive in my Htaccess to 404 all of these URLs 2. Blocked /wp-content/uploads/revslider/ in my robots.txt 3. Manually de-inedex each URL using the GSC tool 4. Deleted the plugin However, new URLs still appear in Google's index, despite being blocked by robots.txt and resolving to a 404. Can anyone suggest any next steps? I Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Google Indexed a version of my site w/ MX record subdomain
We're doing a site audit and found "internal" links to a page in search console that appear to be from a subdomain of our site based on our MX record. We use Google Mail internally. The links ultimately redirect to our correct preferred subdomain "www", but I am concerned as to why this is happening and if it can have any negative SEO implications. Example of one of the links: Links aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com/about/solar-power-blog/daniel-sullivan/renewable-energy-and-electric-cars-are-not-political-footballs I did a site operator search, site:aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com on google and it returns several results.
Technical SEO | | SS.Digital0 -
Why does my Google Web Cache Redirects to My Homepage?
Why does my Google Webcache appears in a short period of time and then automatically redirects to my homepage? Is there something wrong with my robots.txt? The only files that I have blocked is below: User-agent: * Disallow: /bin/ Disallow: /common/ Disallow: /css/ Disallow: /download/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /medias/ Disallow: /ClientInfo.aspx Disallow: /*affiliateId* Disallow: /*referral*
Technical SEO | | Francis.Magos0 -
How preproduction website is getting indexed in Google.
Hi team, Can anybody please help me to find how my preproduction website and urls are getting indexed in Google.
Technical SEO | | nlogix0 -
Removed Subdomain Sites Still in Google Index
Hey guys, I've got kind of a strange situation going on and I can't seem to find it addressed anywhere. I have a site that at one point had several development sites set up at subdomains. Those sites have since launched on their own domains, but the subdomain sites are still showing up in the Google index. However, if you look at the cached version of pages on these non-existent subdomains, it lists the NEW url, not the dev one in the little blurb that says "This is Google's cached version of www.correcturl.com." Clearly Google recognizes that the content resides at the new location, so how come the old pages are still in the index? Attempting to visit one of them gives a "Server Not Found" error, so they are definitely gone. This is happening to a couple of sites, one that was launched over a year ago so it doesn't appear to be a "wait and see" solution. Any suggestions would be a huge help. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | SarahLK0 -
Google stopped crawling my site. Everybody is stumped.
This has stumped the Wordpress staff and people in the Google Webmasters forum. We are in Google News (have been for years), and so new posts are crawled immediately. On Feb 17-18 Crawl Stats dropped 85%, and new posts were no longer indexed (not appearing on News or search). Data highlighter attempts return "This URL could not be found in Google's index." No manual actions by Google. No changes to the website; no custom CSS. No Site Errors or new URL errors. No sitemap problems (resubmitting didn't help). We're on wordpress.com, so no odd code. We can see the robot.txt file. Other search engines can see us, as can social media websites. Older posts still index, but loss of News is a big hit. Also, I think overall Google referrals are dropping. We can Fetch the URL for a new post, and many hours later it appears on Google and News, and we can then use Data Highlighter. It's now 6 days and no recovery. Everybody is stumped. Any ideas? I just joined, so this might be the wrong venue. If so, apologies.
Technical SEO | | Editor-FabiusMaximus_Website0 -
Which Sitemap to keep - Http or https (or both)
Hi, Just finished upgrading my site to the ssl version (like so many other webmasters now that it may be a ranking factor). FIxed all links, CDN links are now secure, etc and 301 Redirected all pages from http to https. Changed property in Google Analytics from http to https and added https version in Webmaster Tools. So far, so good. Now the question is should I add the https version of the sitemap in the new HTTPS site in webmasters or retain the existing http one? Ideally switching over completely to https version by adding a new sitemap would make more sense as the http version of the sitemap would anyways now be re-directed to HTTPS. But the last thing i can is to get penalized for duplicate content. Could you please suggest as I am still a rookie in this department. If I should add the https sitemap version in the new site, should i delete the old http one or no harm retaining it.
Technical SEO | | ashishb010 -
CDN Being Crawled and Indexed by Google
I'm doing a SEO site audit, and I've discovered that the site uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that's being crawled and indexed by Google. There are two sub-domains from the CDN that are being crawled and indexed. A small number of organic search visitors have come through these two sub domains. So the CDN based content is out-ranking the root domain, in a small number of cases. It's a huge duplicate content issue (tens of thousands of URLs being crawled) - what's the best way to prevent the crawling and indexing of a CDN like this? Exclude via robots.txt? Additionally, the use of relative canonical tags (instead of absolute) appear to be contributing to this problem as well. As I understand it, these canonical tags are telling the SEs that each sub domain is the "home" of the content/URL. Thanks! Scott
Technical SEO | | Scott-Thomas0