Traffic has not recovered from https switch a year ago.
-
I have an ecommerce site that was switched to https a year ago almost to the day. Our category pages are about half of what they were. The redirects were put in properly, and everything in webmaster tools looks good. Anything out there I may not have thought of?
Want to add that the drop is only in Google, Bing stayed just fine.
-
I have read in so many places that it caused a dip for others as well. I had a really bad experience with a site move once so I had a checklist of everything and double and triple checked it, but it has just been a slow decline.
-
We experienced the same thing and I am fairly certain that we did EVERYTHING right. I just think the algorithms are messed a little. I even made a competitor analysis and found that all the websites that did the https move have experienced a major dip in the past. I cannot tie it to the move date, but it is clearly visible on semrush.
I have a feeling that google endorsed this https move because they need the referer data to make their analytics product work better over time, but while this whole web wide move is happening they accept some collateral damage. I even hired consultants and there is no proof anywhere that https is that "positive ranking signal" Matt Cutts vaguely indicated...but then again he said it is a ranking signal and it might as well be a negative ranking signal by that wording. My hunch so far.
-
Hi Cyrus,
1. I believe that pagination is implemented correctly. Is there anything specific you think I should check?
2. Canonicals are in place.
3. The category pages do not have their own introductory text.
4. We have the title tags and descriptions set.
Wanted to also add that we have the correct schema on the pages as well.
-
We've actually seen Google get harsh on category-type pages across a wide number of industries and sites. It's even happened here at Moz. If your HTTPS is implemented correctly (and sounds like you are reasonably certain it is) you might want to look to other areas.
I'd look at your category pages and make sure:
- Pagination is implemented correctly
- Canonical are in place, where appropriate
- If possible, each category should have it's own introductory text, i.e. https://moz.com/ugc/category/link-building
- Basically, do everything you can to treat your category pages like actual landing pages worthy of search traffic, including unique content, value, title tags, descriptions, etc.
-
I don't see where he asked about the site structure, but no it didn't change.
Reporting has not changed, no new filters, we block our company's visits, tracking code is consistent.
-
You didn't answer Dirk's question (above). Has the site structure changed at all?
Has your reporting changed? Added any new filters? Forgot to block your own company's visits from being tracked? Is the tracking code consistent on all pages? (Although it's probably not a reporting problem if, as you say, rankings and sales have also dropped.)
It's good you're doing the audit. Doesn't appear to be an obvious problem.
-
All pages have dipped a little but the category pages seems to have lost the bulk. We have had rankings and sales drops. Canonicals are in correctly and sitemaps have been updated properly.
-
1. The traffic decline wasn't sudden or initially very much. If you look at our traffic it looks like a pyramid with the peak being when we switched to https. It has just been a slow gradual decline every since.
2. The migration was Sept 11 last year, I don't think there was anything that week.
3. User behavior has stayed constant.
4. No spike in errors, the migration went very smooth.
-
Is it just the category pages that have lost traffic? Have rankings and sales also changed significantly? Are canonicals pointing to https? Have sitemaps been updated?
-
Did the traffic drop occur right after the migration to https or a few months/weeks later?
Was the migration close to the date of an algorithm change?
Did you see any change in behaviour of your users after migration (time on page, bounce rate, avg. pages/session,...)?
Was there a spike of errors in WMT after migration or did everything go quite smoothly?
Was it just a migration to https - or did other elements change on the website?
To be very honest - trying to figure out one year after migration what went wrong is an almost impossible task - especially because you don't have access to the WMT data from migration.
The best you can do is to dive deep in to your analytics figures (search traffic) and compare data before/after migration and try to understand what might have had an impact.
rgds,
Dirk
-
I am in the middle of doing an audit to see if I may have missed something. We are fully mobile optimized. Maybe it was a penalty but there has never been a single black hat trick used on the site. Panda hit that month but we have just been on a slow decline for the last year so that it is now 50%. As an ecommerce site I can't think of a scenario where Panda would hit us unless we were doing something we shouldn't have.
-
HTTPS did cause the site speed to slow down a little bit, we knew that was coming so right after launch we did some optimizations so it is now faster with https then before with http.
-
It's impossible to say without seeing the site and, likely, without seeing analytics. What I can tell you is that the issue may not have anything to do with HTTPS. There have been updates to Google's algorithms, and many other things. Mobile optimization has become a huge point, for instance. I would run an audit of your site for both technical and SEO issues to see if those might help.
-
Moving to https could have an impact on your site's perfomance - which may counter the potential benefits of migrating to https. If you compare page load times in Analytics before/after migration - did they go up/down or remained stable?
Dirk
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
-
Using Similar Expired URLs to Send Traffic to My Site
Thanks in advance for any help! I have an existing website with content on a particular topic. I have discovered a few similar expired URLs that might still get some traffic. One in particular still has a number of valid links from other sites. Would it make sense for me to buy those URLs (which are really cheap) and just use them to send that traffic to my site? If so, am I better using a 301 redirect or having a home page on the new site that just mentions that the old site is expired, and that they might want to instead link over to my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alanjosephs0 -
Http > https Switch Before Platform Migration?
We are planning a series of large site migrations over the next 12-18 months, moving from one platform to another. It's likely the first will be completed by around Aug this year, with the process running until the back end of 2018. The sites are currently on http, and the plan is to first of all migrate all sites to https in the next couple of months. The concern is that, due to the http>https 301 redirects that will be in place, are we putting ourselves at unnecessary risk by effectively carrying out 2 migrations in the space of a year (in terms of loss of potential authority caused by redirects)? Would we be better to wait, and implement https at point of platform migration instead? Thoughts appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sayers0 -
Huge Spike in Organic/Direct traffic from Mexico
So here's my situation: My company's website usually receives around 80 organic visits/month and 50 direct visits/month from Mexico. However, in July we saw a small uptick to around 170 for each and then in the last 7 days we are in the middle of a massive spike which has put us up to 1400 visits for organic and 820 visits for direct in August. The traffic spike continues as we are almost up to 500 visits just today! Things to know: The visitors are purchasing from our store, staying on our site, browsing around, basically acting like real traffic. I was unable to identify any new links, press, and we did not do any specific Mexico optimization (spanish keywords). We sell a ball and it is called The One World Futbol, but it's always been called a futbol before so nothing new here. our website is www.oneworldplayproject.com. Everyone coming organically is searching our name, not keywords. We updated our shopping cart a few days before the massive traffic spike and significantly lowered the cost to ship to Mexico. Our Latin America director went to Mexico to work there for a month a few days before the spike and sent out a bunch of emails, texts, phone calls, what's app notifications to his large network. From what I am told by others here he has a vast network throughout Mexico, Central America and South America. We have also seen large traffic increases in other Latin American countries during this same time period just nothing like Mexico. We just hired an awesome social media coordinator who is extremely focused and is implementing a kick-ass social strategy We launched a branding campaign called #MakeLifePlayFull with press releases and ad spend behind it. PHEW! That was a lot of info for you to digest. So on the surface this seems like great news. BUT I want to understand WHY this is happening. Could it really just be the combination of all these things listed above or is it just a combination of our connected guy being in Mexico with better shipping costs? Why is it mainly happening in Mexico? Why is it so sustained? I suspect that if it is from our guy it would drop off quickly. Any thoughts on what to look at? I'm stumped.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_OWPP0 -
How to Find Competitors Traffic Sources
Is it possible to find out where traffic is coming from on someone else website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hall.Michael0 -
Traffic and keyword drop
Hello, On one of the sites that I manage - http://www.zalikihotel.gr/ , there was a significant decrease in keyword positions over the last 10-15 days. Sample screenshot is attached. Some of the keywords even dropped for 17-18 positions. From the end of April, organic traffic dropped by 30 percent. Website is mobile optimized, so that shouldn't be a problem. In the last 3-4 months, we had traffic increase. Domain authority went up by 3 points after the last index. On-site SEO was completed, and currently I'm focusing on link-building and working on bringing back to life forgotten social media. Does anybody knows what might be the case for this negative affects on our site? Do you think it's a temporary fluctuation or not? Thanks in advance. 8dSBELm.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | socrateskirtsios0 -
HTTPS pages - To meta no-index or not to meta no-index?
I am working on a client's site at the moment and I noticed that both HTTP and HTTPS versions of certain pages are indexed by Google and both show in the SERPS when you search for the content of these pages. I just wanted to get various opinions on whether HTTPS pages should have a meta no-index tag through an htaccess rule or whether they should be left as is.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jamie.Stevens0 -
Http, https and link juice
I'm working on a site that is built on DNN. For some reason the client has set all pages to convert to HTTPS (although this is not perfect as some don't when landing on them). All pages indexed in Google are straight HTTP, but when you click on the Google result a temp 302 header response to the corresponding HTTPS page for many. I want it changed to a 301 but unfortunately is an issue for DNN. Is there another way around this in IIS that won't break DNN as it seems to be a bit flaky? I want to have the homepage link juice pass through for all links made to non HTTPS homepage. Removing HTTPS does not seem to be an option for them.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Leaking organic traffic - how to debug?
Hi all, We've been running an eCommerce marketplace for more than 2.5 years now. Most of our traffic and revenue have been from organic traffic, which have been growing steadily with our inventory and brand, peaking at March this year. From there, we started losing organic traffic (and revenue) each month, at a rate of about 15-20% - for no reason we can understand. In addition, some of our older pages no longer appear in search results (unless we add the name of the site to the search query). We launched a redesign on the end of May, which seemed to initially improve engagement, but didn't affect this trend of lower organic traffic. Our webmaster tools doesn't show anything special - if anything, we made an effort to clean-up every 404 that appears there and other small issues. We did make the following changes very recently, but it did not seem to have a positive effect (so far): We have deep pagination for some categories of the site, and we just added rel=prev,next in the head of every paginated series on the site. We started generating a dynamic sitemap and submitted it to google. For some reason only about a fourth of the pages on the sitemap are indexed. In addition, the "index status" as reported by webmaster tools shows some weird numbers. First, the number there is way bigger than the amount of pages we have - possibly all the combinations of our listing categories and pagination. That number was constant for a while, before taking a deep earlier this year, rising back up and declining again for the last couple of months. Screenshot of the graph What would be the first steps you'd take to understand the core of the problem? we're really at a loss here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | erangalp1