Question #1: Does Google index https:// pages? I thought they didn't because....
-
generally the difference between https:// and http:// is that the s (stands for secure I think) is usually reserved for payment pages, and other similar types of pages that search engines aren't supposed to index. (like any page where private data is stored)
My site that all of my questions are revolving around is built with Volusion (i'm used to wordpress) and I keep finding problems like this one.
The site was hardcoded to have all MENU internal links (which was 90% of our internal links) lead to **https://**www.example.com/example-page/
instead of
**http://**www.example.com/example-page/
To double check that this was causing a loss in Link Juice. I jumped over to OSE.
Sure enough, the internal links were not being indexed, only the links that were manually created and set to NOT include the httpS:// were being indexed.
So if OSE wasn't counting the links, and based on the general ideology behind secure http access, that would infer that no link juice is being passed...
Right??
Thanks for your time. Screens are available if necessary, but the OSE has already been updated since then and the new internal links ARE STILL NOT being indexed.
The problem is.. is this a volusion problem?
Should I switch to Wordpress?
here's the site URL (please excuse the design, it's pretty ugly considering how basic volusion is compared to wordpress)
-
Hi Tyler
Looks like the duplicate title tags are largely from empty pages like these:
http://www.uncommonthread.com/008-Pink-Ice-p/14410008.htm
http://www.uncommonthread.com/001-Gold-p/14410001.htm
http://www.uncommonthread.com/019-Copper-p/14410019.htm
http://www.uncommonthread.com/027-Electric-Blue-p/14410027.htm
Even though these pages are somewhat unique, the content is definitely "thin" and having a lot of pages like this typically isn't good for rankings.
Ideally, you would list small product variations on the same page, or even have several similar product pages canonical to a master page. Generally if you don't have a 200 words minimum of good editorial content, Google might consider it duplicate.
I don't see any reason why switching to http should cause too much problem if you passed everything through a 301 redirect. To be honest, it's typical for rankings to fluxuate frequently so it could be a million things.
If I look at the text-only cache of the page you sent: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.ontracparts.com&strip=1
... it looks pretty similar. If it were my page, I'd probably try to include more descriptive text on the page, richer descriptions, ets.
Hope this helps!
-
Wow. What an awesome answer.
I literally don't know if I can't thank you enough for taking the time to answer so wholesomely.
I decided to go ahead and fix the https:// and change it to http://
Weird results here.. Traffic went down by 5.5% compared to the month before I posted this thread.
I noticed an increase in duplicate title tags (about 700 - 1000 of them) in my seomoz account.
Could that be likely to be the reason for the decrease? Or is it just because I shouldn't have made such a drastic site-wide change like that?
I am attempting to give unique title tags, and html titles to all of those product pages that are causing the increases in duplicate titles
I also am in a slight predicament because she hired another company to do some "optimization" around October 23rd.
Since then, they have made some spammy changes in my opinion, but some results have shown up (20+% increase starting around Jan 1st, and capping on the day I made the https:// change), and I can't get her to agree with me that we should invest in building a Social following, making better content, and blogging more often, etc. I also think we should move the blog to be in a sub folder on the domain as well..
I compared the webcache you showed me to a wordpress site that i built and the difference really was pretty shocking
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.ontracparts.com
whats the difference as far as rankings and SEs are concerned?
-
Hi Tyler,
Great question! In fact, it's a common misconception that Google doesn't index https. In truth, these days they appear to index most https just fine.
If we do a site operator Google search for https on your site, we get something like this:
site:uncommonthread.com/ inurl:https (click to see results)
This returns 165 URLs on your site with the https protocol.
But.... these URLs don't show up in OSE because at this time, the Linkscape crawler can't crawl https. When it was originally built Google still didn't index https, so it wasn't needed. This should be fixed in just a few months and you should start seeing those https results in there. The good news is that OSE is completely separate from Google and doesn't influence your rankings in any way.
Now for the bad news....
Whenever you have https, you want to make sure you only have ONE version of the url, so that https either redirects (via 301) to the http version, or vice versa. Otherwise Google might index both versions. For example, both of these URLs resolve on your site:
https://www.uncommonthread.com/kb_results.asp?ID=5
http://www.uncommonthread.com/kb_results.asp?ID=5
The solution is to either 301 redirect one to the other, or have an absolute canonical tag on both pages that points to one or the other (an absolute canonical means it contains the full URL, including http or https)
That said, I don't see any evidence that Google has indexed both URL versions of your site (at least not like Dunkin Donuts
Should You Switch to Wordpress?
Based simply on the https issue, switching to Wordpress isn't necessary. But Wordpress does offer other advantages, and is generally a very SEO friendly platform.
There might be other considerations you may consider to switch away from your current CMS.
For example, consider Google's Text-only cache of your homepage: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.uncommonthread.com/default.asp&strip=1
See how barren it is? Without taking a deep dive, it's possible the structure and technology employed by your CMS is causing indexing/crawling issues, and considerable technical effort may be required to make it SEO friendly. I can't give you a definite answer either way, but it's something to think about.
Hope this helps!
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 a definition engine / Question answering engine
But what do you do to rank when you sell a product and people don't have questions and none of the companies that rank on your keywords answers questions... Let me give you a few example. Title tag for example : People want to know what is it and then have question about it What is the maximum number of characters ? How do you write a good one ? Etc... How to remove stains is another example : Please want to know how to remove all the different types of stains, (ketchup, grease etc..) But what about when you are a online business and want to sell usb keys , rent bicycles https://www.spinlister.com or even sell a software to do A/B testing on your website https://bit.ly/2a6cBuF Can someone explain me how those people mentioned rank without giving definition or answering questions... because according to me they don't do any of that on the pages that I mentioned. I look forward to your reply. Thank you,
Web Design | | seoanalytics0 -
Why would a developer build all page content in php?
Picked up a new client. Site is built on Wordpress. Previous developer built nearly all page content in their custom theme's PHP files. In other words, the theme's "page.php" file contains virtually all the HTML for each of the site's pages. Each individual page's back-end page editor appears blank, except for some of the page text. No markup, no widgets, no custom fields. And no dedicated, page-specific php files either. Pages are differentiated within page.php using: elseif (is_page("27") Has anyone ever come across this approach before? Why might someone do this?
Web Design | | mphdavidson0 -
Certain PHP Pages Not Showing In SERPs
Hi all, You've all been so helpful so far, I'm hoping you can help me with our trickiest SEO question yet. Last year we migrated 7 sites into one, going from flat html to Joomla. This went fine and although we saw a slight drop in traffic, it wasn't too bad. Now however traffic has started to drop and we've been able to hone it down into a certain area of our website. Each of the 7 sites had their own page with some php code that was fed products. These products were updated everyday and were are second most popular page on the sites aprt from the home page. These pages were found in Google no problem and were an essential resource for our site. What we have found is these pages cannot be found at all, unless you type the full business name and product. If you just type the product and the location our customer is based in, we're no where, using the Moz tools it says we're not in the top 50 results. This is a bit of a shock since we used to be at least on the first page, usually quite high up. I'm a little stumped as SEO wise these pages are technically better. They offer the same functionality but in a much more SEO friendly way. I've asked our developer to check: Nothing is being blocked in robots.txt
Web Design | | HB17
The pages are being indexed
There's no strange code errors Essentially the pages can't be found even if we type the full title, for example 'customer's products in their town' to be found we have to type 'customer's products in their town and their full business name'. The top third of the page is just html text, the bottom like I mentioned is PHP and is fed data from a database which is refreshed each morning. I know our developer did some rel conical work but has assured me that's all working fine. While I know it's a new website, we've owned the domain for a while so our domain authority isn't brand new and 0, we also have pages with worse page authority that show up on page 1 no problem, so I'm leaning towards something else might not be right. Can anyone help me figure out why these pages are being indexed but not even found? Thanks!0 -
Domain Question
Which would be best for a client: (for promoting the product and SEO) Product on existing business website:
Web Design | | Kdruckenbrod
business.com/category/productname or a completely new domain name for the product:
productname.com Thanks for your feedback.0 -
Are these doorway pages or not? Concerned due to Panda 4.0
For a new site we're building, the Products team wants the header (let's call this Product-Header) to have links to every subsection of every section on every page. Since this is a bad idea, I want Product-Header to be coded in such a way that it doesn't appear in the code or the links are nofollow, noindex. I want to instead create static versions of these pages without the Product-Header. The homepage links to the static URL section pages, those main section pages link to static subsection pages, and so on. It's one nice silo. I am concerned though that Google won't like this due to these static pages are being created specifically for search engines. Users could click through to this static parallel site from the homepage, or they could use the dynamic URL site. This is similar to what etsy.com is doing where you can search Google for "mermaid bridal" and get this page https://www.etsy.com/market/mermaid_bridal but the dynamic version of the page does not show up. However you can search on etsy.com for " mermaid bridal" and get https://www.etsy.com/search?q=mermaid bridal&ship_to=US. Could these static versions that show up in search engines be seen as doorway pages? I know ebay.com got spanked for doorway pages and I don't want to do anything that would get this site penalized.
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
Why is our sitemap not being indexed on Webmaster Tools?
Hi there, We have been having a problem with one of our websites. It appears as though someone has stolen our template and used it for themselves, but in the process also stole our analytics information. We have problems with the analytics, but are fixing that ourselves. The problem we have now is that when we tried to put in a sitemap into Google Webmaster Tools the URLs are submitted but have yet to be indexed. We have tried pinging them, but there has been no change. This is not a problem for our other websites which are very similar. What could be the problem here? For reference, the url is http://www.dentistinlittlerock.com Thank you for your responses in advance!
Web Design | | jid0 -
IP block in Google
Our office has a number of people performing analysis and research on keyword positions, volume, competition etc. We have 1 external static IP address. We installed the static IP so we can filter out our visits in Google Analytics. However by 10 AM we get impssible CAPTCHA's or even get blocked in Google. Do you have any experience with such an issue? Any solutions you can recommend? Any help would be appreciated! SXI5A.png
Web Design | | Partouter0 -
What's the best was to structure Product page information on my site?
Hi - I run a hobby related niche new / article / resource site (http://tinyurl.com/4eavaj4). One of the most critical components of the site is our product database. We don't actually sell anything directly - instead we monetize them by displaying relevant affiliate product feeds and price comparisons. However since the Panda update was implemented in February my traffic (particularly my long tail, product related traffic) has dropped off considerably. I had about a 20% drop in overall traffic, but have made up some of the ground in the past week. However I want to know once and for all how I should structure my product related information as I have a ton of great content that is ready to be published in this section but want to be sure I structure it the best possible way from a SEO standpoint. Here are a few different options I've come up with for displaying information about products on my site. For the purpose of these examples I am going to refer to all of the information that makes up my product pages collectively as "product profiles". Please let me know which is the best SEO wise (or if you have a better way of doing it let me know): - Option 1 - Current Method - Divide Content Sections into different pages / urls Example: http://tinyurl.com/4tpdlbl This is how the majority of my product profiles are currently structured. I did this to improve load times and to keep the total number of links per page down. In addition to the core product profile subpages: "Product Details","Compare Prices", **"**Product Review", "Hot Auctions", and "Checklists", I have the Checklists area further segmented by subset, each of which is on its own page that is only accessible through the main Checklists tab of the profile. - Option 2 - Everything on one url / page the old fashioned way, with everything available by scrolling vertically. This would make the page go on forever though. - Option 3 - Everything on one url / page, but visually segmented using css / javascript tabs. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4kqhauh I looked at the source code and all the page text is there, so it looks like it would be spider-able but you tell me. Or would another method of tabbing be better? My site is wordpress based so the functionality comes from a plugin. - Option 4 - Use post tabs that are technically all on the same page, but make each individual tab be accessible through its own suburl, all of which share the same core canonical url. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4bs9pjs Clicking on any of the individual tabs will result in something like ?postTabs=2 being appended to the core url. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4gvgufc Any input would be greatly appreciated asap! Thanks Mike
Web Design | | MikeATL0