Help, site traffic has dropped significantly since we changed from http to https

[MobileDay]

Heya, so I am just in charge of the content on the site, and the SEO content, not the actual back-end stuff.

A little under 2 weeks ago we switched to https, and our site traffic has been down a lot ever since. When I SERP check our keywords, they don't seem to have dropped in rankings pages.

Here is what I got when I asked our dev guy if 301 redirects were put in:

I did not add any redirects so all of the content is accessible on both unless individual links get hardcoded one way or the other. The only thing in place is a Cloudflare plugin which rewrites links in cached pages to match the way its accessed, so if for example you access a page over https you don’t get the version cached with a bunch of http links since that will throw up mixed content warnings in the browser. Other than that WP mostly generates all its links to match whatever protocol you are accessing the current page with. We can make specific pages redirect one way or the other in the future if we want to though...

As a startup, site traffic is a metric we track to gouge progress, and so I really need to get to the bottom of if it was the change from http to https that has causes the drop, and if so, what can we do about it?

Also, in case it is relevant: the bounce rate is now sky high (ave. 15% to 64% this last week!)

Any help is very welcome! Site: https://mobileday.com

Thank you!

[MattRoney]

Hi MobileDay! Did these answers help?

[BlueprintMarketing]

John gave you some fantastic answers.

He just told you exactly what you need to do a couple things I thought I could share with you.

When adding HTTPS this I found this reference invaluable

https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/the-zen-guide-to-https-configuration/

Then from checking out your existing 301's you are in need of a canonical that everything  that is https or http redirects to a secular canonical URL. https://mobileday.com  use https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/canonical/   you want the canonical to have the absolute link. Do a search and replace.

|

Like this

NOT

rel="canonical" href="//mobileday.com/" />

|

In order to be sure that you are redirecting properly use

https://varvy.com/tools/redirects/  to check your redirects

then sign up with a free account on

http://www.robotto.org/

it will continually monitor your robots.txt,  Canonicals redirects everything for free it's awesome. the tool displays redirects from www and non-www versions of a url using both http and https.

you definitely need to 301 your site to one canonical URLSEE a bigger photo below and available via the URL herehttp://i.imgur.com/mI7PM6s.png

www

No redirect

Final status code: 200

no www

No redirect

Final status code: 200

www (https)

1 Redirect

https://www.mobileday.com 
** 301 redirect**
https://mobileday.com/

Final status code: 200

no www (https)

No redirect

Final status code: 200

Here is a reference showing is fairly normal to lose ranking when you add HTTPS hopefully you did contact Google's search console your site should be added there a total of four times and you pick the canonical of the four sites

1. http://www.mobileday.com
2. http://mobileday.com
3. https://mobileday.com <- this is where to point the other 3 urls
4. https://www.mobileday.com

You will want to pick your chosen canonical which appears to be https://mobileday.com

Considering you're using cloudflare you can create rewrites as well as 301 redirects inside of the CDN/WAF using page rules

Please keep in mind that when you're setting up the HTTPS://  for the first time using a low time to live or server caching time with cloud flares (HSTS),

https://blog.cloudflare.com/enforce-web-policy-with-hypertext-strict-transport-security-hsts/

is going to keep you from making mistakes that cannot be reverted for whatever the remainder of the value is.  Whenever you do set it up in cloud flare I recommend you set it for 24 hours see how it works use this to add your site to browsers https://hstspreload.appspot.com/

• https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168306-Is-there-a-tutorial-for-Page-Rules-
• https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pagerules-url-forwarding/
• https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pagerules-fine-grained-feature-co/

Rule Patterns

A pattern is the definition of what URLs a rule should act on. It can be as simple as a verbatim match, or complex with wildcards. For purposes of Page Rules' patterns a URL can be composed of:

<scheme>://<domain>:<port><path &="" query=""></path></port></domain></scheme>

 remember to check everything before making the browsers forward to https automatically and do it for a short time first.

http://web-sniffer.net/  

&

https://tools.deepcrawl.co.uk/fetch-as-deepcrawl/

Are great tools for this job so is screaming frog SEO Spider

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

 I sincerely hope I was of help,

 Thomas 

mI7PM6s.png

[dohertyjf]

Hi MobileDay -

Well, sounds like you have some issues on your hands! Hopefully I can help sort it out.

First, get those redirects in place! There is no reason for users to be able to access it on both non-secure and secure. If you made the move to implement HTTPS, you want your users there as it helps with trust. Also, you're spreading your link equity. It looks like the search engines are ranking HTTPS, but that also means that the links going to any and all http pages are likely not being counted towards HTTPS. This is likely hurting your longtail traffic, which only you can see in Analytics.

Second, your canonicals are relative and not correct. It's rel="canonical" href="//mobileday.com/" />, which I am surprised to see since you are using Yoast SEO (so I guess you are on Wordpress). A quick way to help fix your duplicate content issues is to a) make those absolute and b) point them to where you want the crawlers to go (I suspect HTTPS).

A canonical is a band-aid though and the search engines do not always respect them. The right fix is a 301.

Also, more things to check:

• Are the URLs in your sitemaps HTTPS or HTTP? They should be the one you want to rank.
• You should declare where your sitemaps are in your robots.txt file (I don't see them here - http://mobileday.com/robots.txt or here - https://mobileday.com/robots.txt)
• I assume you have both HTTP and HTTPS verified in Search Console. Look at if your impressions have dropped on HTTP and see what is going on with HTTPS. This will tell you a lot.
• Regarding bounce rates, what else changed? I wonder if there is an issue with your HTTPS implementation and it's not working correctly on some mobile devices (or desktop browsers). Dig into your Analytics to see which platforms and browsers have a high bounce rate, and solve from there. You should also check to see if it's a specific page type that is bouncing a lot to see if there is an issue with that page type.

Good luck!