Website Displayed by Google as Https: when all Secure Content is Blocked - Causing Index Prob.
-
Basically, I have no inbound likes going to https://www.mysite.com , but google is indexing the Homepage only as https://www.mysite.com
In June, I was re included to the google index after receiving a penalty... Most of my site links recovered fairly well. However my homepage did not recover for its top keywords.
Today I notice that when I search for my site, its displayed as https://
Robots.txt blocks all content going to any secure page. Leaving me sort of clueless what I need to do to fix this. Not only does it pose a problem for some users who click, but I think its causing the homepage to have an indexing problem.
Any ideas? Redirect the google bot only? Will a canonical tag fix this?
Thx
-
Yeah, I have all of that in place. I found 1 external link from an https , and 1 on my blog that was just an error one of my employees made. 2 Links total, at least thats what I found. Robots blocking everything you mentioned. My header uses absolute paths.
I do agree with you on one thing, once kicked, the little things that may not have mattered over the past 15 years all the sudden pop up as problems... At the same time I have heard the complete opposite, people are kicked and then they are right back where they used to be a few weeks after being included.
Competitive sabotage is positively happening, unless a random person who happens to live in the same city my competitor is located just went awol and decided they wanted to spam my offsite forums, attempt to hack the website multiple times, and add me to a spam link rink.
Anyway a webmaster says he has changed the canonical on their end to http , although it hasnt changed yet. I'm sure this could take a few days or longer to take place. Hopefully that is the fix, we'll see though and thanks for the advise!
-
Someone could probably have an answer to you within minutes if they had the domain URL available.
RE: Competitive sabotage, I very highly doubt it.
RE: Having just occurred - That is often a sticking-point for no good reason. Do not be concerned so much as to why it wasn't an issue before and focus on how to fix it now. Google's algorithm changes all the time. Your standing in the algorithm changes all the time. Trust can be lost if you get a penalty, even if you get out of it. One external link too many going to https, or one change in the crawl path so Googlebog ends up on the https site via a relative path link... Things can suddenly change for a variety of reasons. However, if you do what is being suggested you are very likely to put this issue behind you.
Here is what I do with eCommerce sites, typically:
- Rel canonical both versions to the http version
- Add a robots.txt block and robots meta noindex tag to shopping cart pages
- Use absolute paths, if possible (e.g. http://www.domain.com/file/ instead of .../file/), especially in your primary navigation and footer links.
If that doesn't work please let us know and we can evaluate the site for you.
Good luck!
-
Hmm, see no major changes have been made to the cart. The website has ranked for 15 years, so the https thing just popped up after the penalty/ re inclusion.
I'm wondering, since the canonical tag was added fairly recently. Do you think I should just fetch the homepage and submit again? Or even add a new page, and fetch/crawl/submit that?
Just to get a fresh crawl? Crawl stats show about 2250 on average daily, so I was expecting this https thing to be gone by now... Regardless of why they chose it to index over my normal link.
thx for the input
-
How about changing all of your links from relative to absolute in the HTML? If they're truly only getting there from navigation internally after visiting the shopping cart, this would solve that, yes? Just a thought.
-
If that is the case, then your shopping cart is not "acting right". Https will exist for every page in your site and it shouldn't. What cart are you using? I would redirect everything outside of the payment, cart, and contact pages to non secure. There is a disconnect from what robots files actually do and what people think they do. They are a suggestion, no index means not to add it to the index, but it does not mean don't go on that page. I have spiders on pages that are blocked from them all of the time.
-
My only concern with doing a redirect is this. The shopping cart is https: , so if you start the checkout process you will enter https:
If person decides to continue shopping... They will stay in the https, but since the checkout page is restricted to bots, essentially https doesnt exist and shouldnt show on any searches.
The sitemaps is clean, and a canonical is in place...
I have been having some issues with a competitor, is it possible they submitted https://www.mysite.com/ version of my website knowing that google will prefer this version?
thx for the advise
-
I would redirect the https version to http. Then I would make sure that there is a cannonical tag in place, next I would go over my site map and make sure that there isn't an link to the https page in there. After that you should be set, I wouldn't put it in the robots.txt though.
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
-
We are redirecting http and non www versions of our website. Should all versions http (non www version and www version) and https (non www version) should just have 1 redirect to the https www version?
We are redirecting http and non www versions of our website. Should all versions http (non www version and www version) and https (non www version) should just have 1 redirect to the https www version? Thant way all forms of the website are pointing to one version?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Only 285 of 2,266 Images Indexed by Google
Only 285 of 2,266 Images Indexed by Google. Images for our site are hosted on Amazons CDN cloud based hosting service. Our Wordpress site is on a virtual private server and has its' own IP address. The number of indexed images has dropped substantially in the last year. Our site is for a real estate brokerage firm. There are about 250 listing pages set to "no-index". Perhaps these contain 400 photos, so they do not account for why so few photos have been indexed. The concern is that the low number of indexed images could be affecting overall ranking. The site URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. Is this issue something that we should be concerned about? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Google Processing but Not Indexing XML Sitemap
Like it says above, Google is processing but not indexing our latest XML sitemap. I noticed this Monday afternoon - Indexed status was still Pending - and didn't think anything of it. But when it still said Pending on Tuesday, it seemed strange. I deleted and resubmitted our XML sitemap on Tuesday. It now shows that it was processed on Tuesday, but the Indexed status is still Pending. I've never seen this much of a lag, hence the concern. Our site IS indexed in Google - it shows up with a site:xxxx.com search with the same number of pages as it always has. The only thing I can see that triggered this is Sunday the site failed verification via Google, but we quickly fixed that and re-verified via WMT Monday morning. Anyone know what's going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Thousands of Web Pages Disappered from Google Index
The site is - http://shop.riversideexports.com We checked webmaster tools, nothing strange. Then we manually resubmitted using webmaster tools about a month ago. Now only seeing about 15 pages indexed. The rest of the sites on our network are heavily indexed and ranking really well. BUT the sites that are using a sub domain are not. Could this be a sub domain issue? If so, how? If not, what is causing this? Please advise. UPDATE: What we can also share is that the site was cleared twice in it's lifetime - all pages deleted and re-generated. The first two times we had full indexing - now this site hovers at 15 results in the index. We have many other sites in the network that have very similar attributes (such as redundant or empty meta) and none have behaved this way. The broader question is how to do we get the indexing back ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | suredone0 -
WMT Index Status - Possible Duplicate Content
Hi everyone. A little background: I have a website that is 3 years old. For a period of 8 months I was in the top 5 for my main targeted keyword. I seemed to have survived the man eating panda but not so sure about the blood thirsty penguin. Anyway; my homepage, along with other important pages, have been wiped of the face of Google's planet. First I got rid of some links that may not have been helping and disavowed them. When this didn't work I decided to do a complete redesign of my site with better content, cleaner design, removed ads (only had 1) and incorporated social integration. This has had no effect at all. I filed a reconsideration request and was told that I have NOT had any manual spam penalties made against me, by the way I never received any warning messages in WMT. SO, what could be the problem? Maybe it's duplicate content? In WMT the Index Status indicates that there are 260 pages indexed. However; I have only 47 pages in my sitemap and when I do a site: search on Google it only retrieves 44 pages. So what are all these other pages? Before I uploaded the redesign I removed all the current pages from the index and cache using the remove URL tool in WMT. I should mention that I have a blog on Blogger that is linked to a subdomain on my hosting account i.e. http://blog.mydomain.co.uk. Are the blog posts counted as pages on my site or on Blogger's servers? Ahhhh this is too complicated lol Any help will be much appreciated! Many thanks, Mark.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nortski0 -
Google & Bing not indexing a Joomla Site properly....
Can someone explain the following to me please. The background: I launched a new website - new domain with no history. I added the domain to my Bing webmaster tools account, verified the domain and submitted the XML sitemap at the same time. I added the domain to my Google analytics account and link webmaster tools and verified the domain - I was NOT asked to submit the sitemap or anything. The site has only 10 pages. The situation: The site shows up in bing when I search using site:www.domain.com - Pages indexed:- 1 (the home page) The site shows up in google when I search using site:www.domain.com - Pages indexed:- 30 Please note Google found 30 pages - the sitemap and site only has 10 pages - I have found out due to the way the site has been built that there are "hidden" pages i.e. A page displaying half of a page as it is made up using element in Joomla. My questions:- 1. Why does Bing find 1 page and Google find 30 - surely Bing should at least find the 10 pages of the site as it has the sitemap? (I suspect I know the answer but I want other peoples input). 2. Why does Google find these hidden elements - Whats the best way to sort this - controllnig the htaccess or robots.txt OR have the programmer look into how Joomla works more to stop this happening. 3. Any Joomla experts out there had the same experience with "hidden" pages showing when you type site:www.domain.com into Google. I will look forward to your input! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Does Google index url with hashtags?
We are setting up some Jquery tabs in a page that will produce the same url with hashtags. For example: index.php#aboutus, index.php#ourguarantee, etc. We don't want that content to be crawled as we'd like to prevent duplicate content. Does Google normally crawl such urls or does it just ignore them? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoppc20120 -
When you buy a domain or website, does that trigger a fresh look by Google?
I recently purchased a domain and the corresponding website. For as far as I could tell, in the 12 months prior to my purchase, the site was well optimized within Google and had over 40 search terms on page 1 of Google in a really competitive space (lending-related). When I made the purchase, the domain was transferred from seller's GoDaddy account and into my GoDaddy account and I placed privacy protection on the domain. We did not move the hosting of the site--I took over his hosting account. And I did not make any significant changes to the website. About 1 week later, the site was totally removed from Google's index and I received notice in Google Webmaster Tools that the site may violate Google's quality guidelines. I filed reconsideration request telling Google that I was the new owner and that if there were any violations, they were caused by old owner. One week later, I got note back from Google saying they had received my reconsideration request and if they think issues are cured, then they will reindex the site. That was over a week ago and so seemingly they are not putting it back. My question is this: Does Google somehow automatically know when domains change hands and does this cause them to manually review sites? The site in question was aggressively optimized but I don't understand what would have caused Google to take action on the site when they did. In other words, if they were going to take action, why wouldn't they have done it in the prior 12 months or does the domain transfer put the site into some queue that makes them review it? BTW, the site in question has a SEOMoz domain authority grade of 85 and still is showing up as PR 5 Thanks very much for your time and consideration
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | whodatyat0