Redirecting HTTP to HTTPS - How long does it take Google to re-index the site?
-
hello Moz
We know that this year, Moz changed its domain to moz.com from www.seomoz.org
however, when you type "site:seomoz.org" you still can find old urls indexed on Google (on page 7 and above)We also changed our site from http://www.example.com to https://www.example.com
And Google is indexing both sites even though we did proper 301 redirection via htaccess.- How long would it take Google to refresh the index? We just don't worry about it?
- Say we redirected our entire site. What is going to happen to those websites that copied and pasted our content? We have already DMCAed their webpages, but making our site https would mean that their website is now more original than our site? Thus, Google assumes that we have copied their site? (Google is very slow on responding to our DMCA complaint)
Thank you in advance for your reply.
-
Unfortunately, the answer is "it depends".
I do have some recent experience with this for 2 very small sites (one has around 300 indexed URL, the other has around 70), which you may find useful.
In each case, it took just a day or two to get the most important URLs (best rankings, traffic, link authority, etc.) swapped in for their non-https counterparts. However, deeper URLs with little link authority took up to 90 days to be swapped out.
If your most important URLs don't get swapped out in a week or so, I would check these things:
- Make sure you've updated internal links so that they point to the https URLs. You don't want to pass your link authority through 301s anyways.
- Make sure all versions of the site are verified in GWT, setting the https version as the preferred version.
- Make sure your sitemaps (XML and HTML) contain the https versions of your URLs
- Make sure that the https URLs do not have the non-https URL's set as the canonical version.
Hope this helps and good luck!
-
Google is super fast when it comes to the main, most important stuff on your domain. It's still indexing stuff from the old SEOmoz.org domain because we have a ton of pages! and frankly, some of them aren't very popular. We also made the decision not to redirect every single page and killed a ton of them. The less popular pages are lingering (though with the right 301 redirects, we're still getting that traffic to the still important to us pages) with SEOmoz.org, either waiting to be indexed at Moz.com or tossed out as they no longer exist.
For dealing with people who are scraping your site, make sure you have canonical tags implemented on your pages for your shiny new https site. Most scrapers steal the code, so they grab those too.
-
Hi there,
Google says in their guidelines: The time it takes Googlebot and our systems to discover and process all URLs in the site move depends on how fast your servers are and how many URLs are involved. As a general rule, a medium-sized website can take a few weeks for most pages to move, and larger sites take longer. The speed at which Googlebot and our systems discover and process moved URLs depends the number of URLs and the server speed.
You can find out all the information here https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033080?hl=en
Hope it helps you.
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 indexing .com and .co.uk site
Hi, I am working on a site that is experiencing indexation problems: To give you an idea, the website should be www.example.com however, Google seems to index www.example.co.uk as well. It doesn’t seem to honour the 301 redirect that is on the co.uk site. This is causing quite a few reporting and tracking issues. This happened the first time in November 2016 and there was an issue identified in the DDOS protection which meant we would have to point www.example.co.uk to the same DNS as www.example.com. This was implemented and made no difference. I cleaned up the htaccess file and this made no difference either. In June 2017, Google finally indexed the correct URL, but I can’t be sure what changed it. I have now migrated the site onto https and www.example.co.uk has been reindexed in Google alongside www.example.com I have been advised that the http needs to be removed from DDOS which is in motion I have also redirected http://www.example.co.uk straight to https://www.example.com to prevent chain redirects I can’t block the site via robot.txt unless I take the redirects off which could mean that I lose my rankings. I should also mention that I haven't actually lost any rankings, it's just replaced some URLs with co.uk and others have remained the same. Could you please advise what further steps I should take to ensure the correct URL’s are indexed in Google?
Technical SEO | | Niki_10 -
What are the SEO considerations when migrating a whole site from http to https
Hi Mozzers, I'm in the process of migrating a whole site, which has excellent rankings built through ongoing SEO over the years, from http to https. What is the safest way of doing this, while maintaining rankings? I'm assuming 301 redirect of every page from http to https? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | A_Q1 -
Robots.txt on http vs. https
We recently changed our domain from http to https. When a user enters any URL on http, there is an global 301 redirect to the same page on https. I cannot find instructions about what to do with robots.txt. Now that https is the canonical version, should I block the http-Version with robots.txt? Strangely, I cannot find a single ressource about this...
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
Use 302 redirect when site crashes
My company has switched to a new ecommerce platform that we are not totally familiar with yet. As we've worked with it, we've had a couple situations where both the front and back ends of our site crashed simultaneously (always after installing a third party module). The platform's built-in backup solution hasn't been an option in those situations so we've been coming up with alternatives. We now have a duplicate of the site on our server for such emergencies. The plan is to have pages on the broken site point to the backup site using 302 redirects until the broken site is fixed. Is this correct usage of the 302 redirect? I often see people recommend to never use 302 redirects, but I thought this might be the kind of situation where they'd be appropriate. If so, are there other SEO considerations we should keep in mind? For example, I'm wondering if we should put canonical tags on the temporary site that point to the broken site so the broken site stays in the SE indexes.
Technical SEO | | Kyle_M1 -
Https vs http sitemap
I have a site that does a 301 redirect from http to https I currently have a sitemap auto submitted to google webmaster tools using the http pages. (because i didnt have https before) should I disable that sitemap for http and create one for the https only?
Technical SEO | | puremobile0 -
Taking descriptions from Manufacturer sites and Duplicate content
We are doing some inventory improvements eg new photographs from various angles, etc. We are also writing descriptions for each product.. As one of our suppliers has perfect desriptions on their site what is the theory on how duplicate content will affect our ranking for these products if we copy and paste? Also if we change the descriptions, just how different do they need to be? Thanks
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley1 -
Why is Google only indexing 3 of 8 pages?
Hi everyone, I have a small 8 page website I launched about 6 months ago. For the life of me I can not figure out why google is only indexing 3 of the 8 pages. The pages are not duplicate content in any way. I have good internal linking structure. At this time I dont have many inbound links from others, that will come in time. Am I missing something here? Can someone give me a clue? Thanks Tim Site: www.jparizonaweddingvideos.com
Technical SEO | | fasctimseo0 -
Google Places Citations - How Long to Aggregate?
Hi, On Google Places we have clients that have bad data (incorrect name, address, #) on aggregated sites (citysearch, merchantcircle, yelp) which prevents those sites from pulling into the Google Places accounts. We've been manually correcting listings for a while and many times it still hasn't pulled into the Google Places listings for months on end despite the data matching. What are your experiences with correcting aggregated Google Places data, how long has it taken for this data to pull into your places accounts?
Technical SEO | | qlkasdjfw0