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
-
Organic real estate shrinking year on year against adwords?
Hi Guys, Has anyone seen proof or studies which show that organic real estate is shrinking year on year, resulting in fewer clicks to organic results and more to paid search? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marieh0 -
Rel Canonical for HTTP and HTTPS pages
My website has a login that has HTTPS pages. If the visitors doesn't log in they are given an HTTP page that is similar, but slightly different. Should I sure a Rel Canonical for these similar pages and how should that be set up? HTTP to HTTPS version or the other way around? Thank you, Joey
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoeyGedgaud1 -
Traffic drop on this site
I am SEO'ing this site but need some assistance in the analysis. it was doing not too bad but in the last 4 months the google traffic has really fallen off, i suspect the keywords may need improving but any tips or observations would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crowng0 -
From HTTP to HTTPS
Hi We have implemented HTTPS to the our website. Do we need to now redirect the whole site to HTTPS in the HTTACCESS file? Because when you enter the site via a google search or enter the domain directly the site is set to HTTP once we click on a URL on the page it sets it to HTTPS so do we require to redirect from the start? thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Direct_Ram
E0 -
Site experiencing drop in Google rankings and organic traffic after redesign.
Hello, The company that I work for recently implemented a complete redesign for our company website. The former site was old, cumbersome and in desperate need of an update. We streamlined the site structure and made sure to redirect as many pages as we could find to new thematically related pages with 301 redirects. After the launch of our new site we saw a large upswing in "soft" 404 errors despite the fact that most of these pages do redirect upon inspection. So in relation to the soft 404s, for example, is it merely a matter of labeling them as fixed if they redirect properly, or could their be an underling issue with the site itself? Also, a majority or the urls labeled "not found" in webmaster tools are properly redirected. Do these merely need to be marked as fixed, or is there something else that needs to be fixed like the sitemap structure? I appreciate any and all input. Beyond Indigo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeyondIndigo1 -
website Based in India But need traffic from Europe and North America
We are based in India but have all our prospective clientele in Europe and North America. The problem is ; despite all our efforts we are getting almost 60% traffic from India which is not our target region. We have already tried following hosting our website on US server adding GB and US language tags webmaster target region only allows one country so we cannot set the target there Apart from this any other suggestion? Prashant
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TPS20130 -
Content Transfer for Penguin Induced Domain Switch
One of my customers has a mature site that performs very well in ranking and traffic for major keywords, prosun.com. A few years ago we started welproma.com because they were changing their name and branding. We built up welproma.com as an eventual replacement and ramped up to 30% of the Prosun.com traffic. Penguin hit a bit in 2012 but very bad May 24, 2013 and it keeps getting worse. Now they are backing out of the name change, reverting back to prosun.com as the main website. Unfortunately the Welproma.com content is far better in quantity and quality so we would prefer not to waste it. Does anyone think it is a problem to take essentially the exact content from the newer, penalized site and move it to the older well performing site. We will use no links whatsoever between the two sites and take down the new one once we switch.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phogan0 -
Recovering from Programmers Error
Hey Everybody! Last year one of my bigger sites hit a snaffu. I was getting about 300k + hits a day from google, and then, when a developper released an update with a robots.txt file that basically blocked google from the entire site. We didn't notice the bug until a few days later, but by then, it was already too late. My google traffic dropped to 30k a day and I've been having the hardest time coming back ever since. As a matter of fact, hundreds of sites that were aggregating my content started outranking me for my own terms. For over a year, I've been working on building what I lost back and everything seemed to be coming together. I was back at 100k+ hits a day Until today... My developpers repeated the exact same error as last year. They blocked google from crawling my site for over 5 days and now I'm down to 10k se hits a day. My question : Has anyone encountered this problem before and what did you do to come back?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CrakJason0