Authority site drastic ranking drop after google https switch. Please Help!
-
Hi Mozers.
Since Google switched to the https version, our company website (http://we.register.it) indexing switched to the https version (https://www.register.it).
After that the ranking on Google dropped for almost every keyword.
The site is very old and got a great authority and PR 7. It ranked for same keywords for very long time
On each page from years there is the correct meta rel canonical. No spam, and WMT is ok.
Could you please help?
- The internal links are all in http, and in https. If you are https are in https (they are all relatives)
- No changes have been made and the subdomain is in that way from 8 years: the main url has always been http://we.register.it
- Google started this indexing switch around the 15 October
-
Hey Luca
Weird, a similar issue just happened to a friend's site here locally.
To clarify, http pages are still indexed if you search - site:https://www.register.it/ -inurl:https -- but it's just that both http AND https are indexed now.
Also - I don't see we.register.it loading at all - only www.register.it --- was this recently changed? Although I am seeing both we and www indexed in Google. Did we always redirect to www?
Since the HTTPS is redirecting now to HTTP Google will not be able to see the canonical. Here's what I think you should try;
- Undo the 301 redirect from https to http
- In your HTTPS robots.txt file, block crawling
- Register HTTPS in webmaster tools (if not already) and do a URL removal on all the pages you don't want indexed from HTTPS (probably all of them)
- I would strongly recommend sorting out your internal linking using absolute URL paths and ONLY link to pages with HTTPS when they actually are really HTTPS pages. Otherwise links to HTTP.
- Sort out your we vs. www subdomain issue.
This is honestly a slightly involved situation, where we can give cursory advice here, but just want to be transparent that if you're not completely comfortable in what to do, you might want to find someone who can peek behind the curtain (unfortunately as Moz Associates we're not able to log into your accounts or anything).
EDIT: just want to add that you should be sure you have updated and working XML sitemaps for the http and subdomain you want indexed, and they are submitted to WMT
-
No problem Federico.
I do have checked and there aren't any warnings in WMT. Everything looks right!It's very weird that google ranked http://we.register.it in top position for top keywords and since few days google started to index https version (ignored until then). Google first moved all ranking to https version keeping exact same positions and then started to drop everything down.
Any idea?
-
Oh yes, sorry Luca, I thought you were serving different canonicals in each version pointing to itself. The way you have them set is right.
I don't think this is the reason you are seeing the ranking or traffic drop, as actually using the canonicals the right way (the way you are) should avoid any duplicate content issue. But you better cover all the bases and fix everything that could be the reason.
By the way, did you check the manual actions sections in WMT?
-
Hi Federico,
What you are saying about the duplicate issue is definitely right intact we have already planned to 301 redirect one or the other protocol version (http 301 to https or viceversa). Anyway it's very weird that google is realizing this after about 10 years.
Anyway It's not clear to me how Canonicalization it makes it worse.
On the https://www.register.it page there is the following canonicalThis means that we are saying to google that the right page to index is http://we.register.it/ and https://www.register.it is a duplicate of http://we.register.it (which is the page was actually ranking until few days ago).
Am I wrong?Thanks
Luca -
As far as I understand, having both versions of the page HTTP and HTTPS can cause duplicate content issues. Serving pages under both protocols creates 2 pages of each page for search engines, even if the content is the same.
Canonicalization here even makes it worth, as you are actually telling engines to index both as different while they are actually the same.
You need to go with one or the other. Given the common choice and your type of business, I would choose HTTPS and 301redirect ALL HTTP pages to their HTTPS. That can be done with a single PHP line of code (if you are under PHP).
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
-
I have made my new website live. But while checking in Google it is not showing in search result ( site: www.oomfr.com ). Can anybody please advice.
Hi Team, I have made my new website live. But while checking in Google it is not showing in search result ( site: www.oomfr.com ). Can anybody please advice.
Technical SEO | | nlogix0 -
Google Indexing of Site Map
We recently launched a new site - on June 4th we submitted our site map to google and almost instantly had all 25,000 URL's crawled (yay!). On June 18th, we made some updates to the title & description tags for the majority of pages on our site and added new content to our home page so we submitted a new sitemap. So far the results have been underwhelming and google has indexed a very low number of the updated pages. As a result, only a handful of the new titles and descriptions are showing up on the SERP pages. Any ideas as to why this might be? What are the tricks to having google re-index all of the URLs in a sitemap?
Technical SEO | | Emily_A0 -
Google crawl rate dropped after we activated CloudFront
Hello! Previously we've been using Amazon CloudFront for our static content (js, css etc). But to be able to reduce load on our origin servers and to be able to give our international users a good user experience we decided to deliver a couple of our sites through CloudFront. We noticed very nice drops in page load time, but when checking Google webmaster tools we noticed that all CloudFront-activated sites got a huge drop in pages crawled per day (from avg ~3500 to ~150). Also one of the sites have issues with the Google sitemaps (just marked as "Pending" in GWT) and no new pages or updated pages seems to be updated in the Google SERP. The rest of the sites gets some updates on the Google SERP, but very few compared to before CloudFront activation. Is there anybody here who have experience in full site delivery through CloudFront (or other CDNs) and effects on SEO/Google? Would be very glad for any insights or suggestions. The risk is that we need to remove CloudFront if this just continues.
Technical SEO | | Ludde0 -
Google rankings strange behaviour - our site can only be found when searching repeatedly
Hello, We are experiencing something very odd at the moment I hope somebody could shed some light on this. The rankings of our site dropped from page 2 to page 15 approx. 9 months ago. At first we thought we had been penalised and filed a consideration request. Google got back to us saying that there was no manual actions applied to our site. We have been working very hard to try to get the ranking up again and it seems to be improving. Now, according to several serps monitoring services, we are on page 2/3 again for the term "holiday lettings". However, the really strange thing is that when we search for this term on Google UK, our site is nowhere to be found. If you then right away hit the search button again searching for the same term, then voila! our website is on www.alphaholidaylettings.com page 2 / 3! We tried this on many different computers at different locations (private and public computers), making sure we have logged out from Google Accounts (so that customised search results are not returned). We even tried the computers at various retail outlets including different Apple stores. The results are the same. Essentially, we are never found when someone search for us for the first time, our site only shows up if you search for the same term for the second or third time. We just could not understand why this is happening. Somebody told me it could be due to "Google dance" when indices on different servers are being updated, but this has now been going on for nearly 3 months. Has anyone experienced similar situations or have any advice? Many thanks!
Technical SEO | | forgottenlife0 -
My Alexa ranking dropped after a 301 redirect is that bad?
I had all of my non www pages redirect to the www versions. My alexa ranking dropped and keeps dropping after I did this. I'm guessing its because its tracking the non www version. Does anyone know if this is correct and should I worry?
Technical SEO | | CandleCam0 -
Please recommend a tool to list pages on my site.
I have taken a major hit from the latest update. Site has been online for 10 years, white hat SEO all the way but I do have some legacy pages were I would duplicate title or the description on a new page. Things are just unorganized currently and trying to find the best approach to organizing what I already have as well as track new content. I would like to have a tool that would basically extract a list of my current pages, the title tags and the description in an Excel file. Not sure how the pros organinze the SEO on a site but my biright idea is that I can have a large excel file with the pages listed so I can detect duplicate info. Site only has about 300 pages. Just regular php pages, no CMS. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Force70 -
Traffic has dropped from my site.
Hello, I never had amazing traffic, but during the last week my site seems to have almost dropped of search engines. Nothing drastic has changed during this time that I can see would have caused this. The site is http://www.comparebestodds.com Does any one have any ideas that can help? Thanks
Technical SEO | | jwdesign0 -
Google dropping pages from SERPS
The website for my London based plumbing company has thousands of specifically tailored pages for the various services we provide to all the areas in London. It equates to approximately 6000 pages in total. When google has all these pages indexed, we tend to get a fair bit of traffic - as they cater pretty well for long tail searches. However, every once in a while Google will drop the vast majority of our indexed pages from SERPs for a few days or weeks at a time - for example at the moment Google is only indexing 613 whereas last week it was back at the normal ~6000. Why does this happen? We of course lose a lot of organic traffic when these pages don't displayed - what are we doing wrong? Website: www.pgs-plumbers.co.uk
Technical SEO | | guy_andrews0