Authority site drastic ranking drop after google https switch. Please Help!

[luca_cash]

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

[evolvingSEO]

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;

1. Undo the 301 redirect from https to http
2. In your HTTPS robots.txt file, block crawling
3. 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)
4. 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.
5. 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

[luca_cash]

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?

[FedeEinhorn]

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?

[luca_cash]

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 canonical

This 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

[FedeEinhorn]

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).