De-indexing and SSL question
-
Few days ago Google indexed hundreds of my directories by mistake (error with plugins/host), my traffic dropped as a consequence.
Anyway I fixed that and submitted a URL removal request. Now just waiting things to go back to normality.
Meantime I was supposed to move my website to HTTPS this week.
Question:
Should I wait until this indexing error has been fixed or I may as well go ahead with the SSL move?
-
Let me know if you can let me see the domain?
-
PS I agree it would be nice to hear from more people I am sure you will by tomorrow.
-
I respect your want to get this right
“A few days ago, Google indexed hundreds of my directories by mistake (error with plugins/host); my traffic dropped as a consequence.
_ Anyway, I fixed that and submitted a URL removal request. Now just waiting for things to go back to normality.” _
in my opinion, you can see the change happen to the https URLs & you want to be sure that https will not let your unwanted directory back in Google's index.
I think unless you can show me your site better Search & replace will be more comfortable & faster.
Yes, I have used better search & replace many times; it’s a great tool.
Make sure you back up your site before you do a search & replace.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-search-replace/
I think you should be able to see everything needed and more from this great how-to the person who made it is a friend & they don't just show you how to do this on Kinsta they show you how to use Apache & Nginx as well.
It covers everything you might want to think about managed wordpress hosting if this is something you don't feel comfortable doing.
https://kinsta.com/blog/http-to-https/
I would look at Pagely, Pantheon Servebolt & Kinsta.
If it helps, I am ranked in the top 10 or 11 for assisting people on Moz. Unless you only blocked the HTTP version of your directories, then you will have the same results with https.
- Would you allow me to see the domain?
- Who is your hosting company?
Respectfully,
Tom Zickell
-
Hi Tom,
yes I have WordPress, I have read a few guides online about it.for the search and replace part, I found a plugin called Better Search Replace: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-add-ssl-and-https-in-wordpress/
the instructions in the search engine journal article do the search-replace manually. The plugin should be better, have you tried it?
Good question. In all honesty, I think it's safe to go forward with an HTTPS migration.
I am a bit worried. I asked this question to many people in many forums and nobody replies. Which makes me wonder if it's something really bad. It would be nice to have additional opinions.
-
Good question. In all honesty, I think it's safe to go forward with an HTTPS migration.
A "URL removal request"
A simple move to https two different things that can be done at the same time.
if you have a certain set up please let me know I can give you better instructions on how to completely migrate over to HTTPS. Here are some of the basics below.
- https://www.searchenginejournal.com/https-migration-guide/195103/
- https://www.keycdn.com/blog/http-to-https
- https://gofishdigital.com/steps-in-website-https-migration/
if you're using WordPress
- https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-http-to-https/236969/
- Photograph https://imgur.com/q1RfhhH.jpg
Search & Replace in Files
To begin, search for instances of your domain pointing to HTTP URLs of your site.
Use the regex for **“www” **and without “www” URL cases and search for
http:\/\/(www\.)?yourdomain\.com
always search and replace your database if you have one.
remember to implement redirects
NGINX
Add the following to your Nginx config.
<code class=" language-nginx">server { listen 80; server_name domain.com www.domain.com; return 301 https://domain.com$request_uri; }</code>
Apache
Add the following to your
.htaccess
file.<code class=" language-apacheconf">RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]</code>
6. Update your robots.txt File#
Update any hard-coded links or blocking rules you might have in your
robots.txt
that might still be pointing to HTTP directories or files- Update your robots.txt file
- Update your disavow file if you have one
- update Google search console
if you want a very quick easy way to implement HTTPS, redirects as well as certificates I recommend Cloudflare The free version should do it.
-
I hope this helps,
Tom
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
-
Geo Targeting Content Question
Hi, all First question here so be gentle, please My question is around geo targeted dynamic content; at the moment we run a .com domain with, for example, an article about running headphones and then at the end - taking up about 40% of the content - is a review of some people can buy, with affiliate links. We have a .co.uk site with the same page about running headphones and then 10 headphones for the UK market. Note: rel alternative is used on the pages to point to each other, therefore (hopefully) removing duplicate content issues. This design works well but it involves having to build links to two pages, in the case of this example. What we are thinking of doing is to just use the .com domain and having the product page of the page served dynamically, ie, people in the UK see UK products and people in US see US products. What are people's thoughts on this technique, please? From my understanding, it wouldn't be any problem with Google for cloaking etc because a googlebot and a human from the same country will see the same content. The site is made in Wordpress and has <....html lang="en-US"> (for the .com) in the header. Would this cause problems for the page ranking in the UK etc? The ultimate goal of doing this would be to reduce link building efforts by halving the number of pages which links would have to be built for. I welcome any feedback. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | TheMuffinMan0 -
Issues Indexing Translated Pages
I'm having trouble getting http://www.procloud.ch/ to index for their german pages. The english pages are being indexed but not the german. Any ideas? Chris
Technical SEO | | ninel_P0 -
Problems with to many indexed pages
A client of our have not been able to rank very well the last few years. They are a big brand in our country, have more than 100+ offline stores and have plenty of inbound links. Our main issue has been that they have to many indexed pages. Before we started we they had around 750.000 pages in the Google index. After a bit of work we got it down to 400-450.000. During our latest push we used the robots meta tag with "noindex, nofollow" on all pages we wanted to get out of the index, along with canonical to correct URL - nothing was done to robots.txt to block the crawlers from entering the pages we wanted out. Our aim is to get it down to roughly 5000+ pages. They just passed 5000 products + 100 categories. I added this about 10 days ago, but nothing has happened yet. Is there anything I can to do speed up the process of getting all the pages out of index? The page is vita.no if you want to have a look!
Technical SEO | | Inevo0 -
Pages Indexed Not Changing
I have several sites that I do SEO for that are having a common problem. I have submitted xml sitemaps to Google for each site, and as new pages are added to the site, they are added to the xml sitemap. To make sure new pages are being indexed, I check the number of pages that have been indexed vs. the number of pages submitted by the xml sitemap every week. For weeks now, the number of pages submitted has increased, but the number of pages actually indexed has not changed. I have done searches on Google for the new pages and they are always added to the index, but the number of indexed pages is still not changing. My initial thought was as new pages are added to the index, old ones are being dropped. But I can't find evidence of that, or understand why that would be the case. Any ideas on why this is happening? Or am I worrying about something that I shouldn't even be concerned with since new pages are being indexed?
Technical SEO | | ang1 -
Should i index or noindex a contact page
Im wondering if i should noindex the contact page im doing SEO for a website just wondering if by noindexing the contact page would it help SEO or hurt SEO for that website
Technical SEO | | aronwp0 -
Specific Domain Migration Question
My company will be taking over an ecommerce site that is built to get local city/state traffic where the competition is slim to none for the given keyword. This site gets 2500+ visits per day, and we're looking to maintain and eventually grow that traffic. We would like to move that site onto our ecommerce platform which will force URL change and of every 'keyword' city/state page on the site. We're undecided whether to keep it on an unfamiliar platform that already gets traffic or to move it and possibly face the 404's or weeks of redirecting a single keyword-city/state page to another. Any advice or insight would be great!
Technical SEO | | BMac540 -
Panda recovery timeframe question
Site was hit by Panda Aug. 22nd. Lost 90% of Google traffic. I know 🙂 We think we found a reason and made few changes to landing pages structure. Updated sitemaps submitted. When can we expect effect (if any) - few days or after next Panda data refresh? Thank you!P.S. What is also interesting, similar traffic loss from Bing/Yahoo happened at exactly the same date. Does that mean Bing is "stealing" search results from Google when can't provide their own relevant results? 🙂
Technical SEO | | LocalLocal0 -
Magento URL Question
Calling all Magento Kings out there! I'm working on a client' site - powered by magento. I'm looking to rewrite a lot of the URLs. I know there is the URL rewrite tool, but I think what I need to do may go beyond this. Typical example would be: Old URL - http://www.xxxxxxxx.co.uk/fabric/product/product-black-screen-print-and-silver-fabric.html New URL - http://www.xxxxxx.co.uk/fabric/product/silver I know that magento's URLs seem to be created through categories so wanted to double check with someone the best way to do this. Also, I've heard that 301 redirects of non www to www in the .htaccess has a knock on effect on discounts? All comments greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | PerchDigital0