Http and https protocols being indexed for e-commerce website

[Jacobsheehan]

Hi team,

Our new e-commerce website has launched and I've noticed both http and https protocols are being indexed.

www.mountainjade.co.nz

Our old website was http with only the necessary pages running https (cart, checkout etc). No https pages were indexed and you couldn't access a https page if you manually typed it into the browser.

We outrank our competition by a mile, so I'm treading carefully here and don't want to undo the progress we made on the old site, so I have a few questions:

1. How exactly do we remove one protocol from the index? We are running on Drupal. We tried a hard redirect from https to http and excluded the relevant pages (cart, login etc from the redirect), but found that you could still access https pages if you we're in the cart (https) and then pressed back on the browser button for example. At that point you could browse the entire site on https.

2. Is the safer option to emulate what we had in place on the old website e.g http with only the necessary pages being https, rather than making the switch to sitewide https?

I've been struggling with this one, so any help would be much appreciated.

Jake S

[Jacobsheehan]

Just checked my GA data and you're right. Referral data from mountainjade.co.nz is there. Thanks for the heads up.

I've decided to make the switch to https, so will be organising that with dev in the coming few weeks. I'll keep you posted!

Cheers for the help again Logan,

I owe ya.

[Jacobsheehan]

Great!

I've decided to make the full switch to https now, rather than wait to do it.

I will report back and let you know how it all goes!

Thanks for your help Laura.

[LoganRay]

I don't know why this didn't cross my mind until now, but having both versions can also mess up your Google Analytics data. Going from one to the other (can't remember which direction) creates a new session. You've probably got a lot of self-referring traffic showing up in your reports.

[Jacobsheehan]

Hey Bas,

My developers share your sentiment!

Both versions of the website can be accessed by both the customer and the bots, but because we use relative urls, it can switch between http and https is a single session. This is one example:

1. Land on the homepage from a google search (http homepage is indexed).

2. Browse site on http. Add something to cart. Go to cart.

3. Cart switches to https. Navigate out of cart back into website.

4. Now urls are all https because the links on our site are relative and don't specify a protocol (e.g customer is in cart and then wants to check contact us page, it's link when clicked is as follows [Contact](/contact us). So it pulls the https protocol as there is not http protocol specified in that contact us link.

Hmmm, it definitely could be effecting UX and conversion.

[LauraSultan]

Ideally, you'll migrate the entire site to https, and Cyrus' guide is a good one. Google has some helpful info for an http to https migration at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543?hl=en.

The canonical tag solution is for the situation where you can't or don't want to go ahead and switch the whole site over to https right away.  Either way, make sure Google knows, either through 301-redirects or canonical tags, that the http and https versions are the same page.

[Jacobsheehan]

Hi Laura,

Wow, when I said we have self referencing canonicals in place (through Drupal Yoast) I hadn't even thought that it could be applying a canonical to the https version of the site aswell.

I just crawled both http and https and as you're right, the following is happening:

http://example.com is canonicalized to http://example.com

https://example.com is canonicalized to https://example.com

But I'm a little confused. In my first post I was looking for help because google was indexing both http and https pages. Are you saying that it's because of these canonicals that google is indexing both? Would it index both even if I didn't have the canonicals in place but still had SSL?

Just to confirm, canonicalizing the http URLs to the https URLs will tell google to fold the http URLs into the https and only index the https version of the site? Would I need to follow the https migration guide by Cyrus when doing this, or is this not really a 'migration' to https as we're not forcing the customer to browse in https?

Bear with me!

[LoganRay]

I agree with the others. I think you should pick a horse and ride it. Indecision is only causing more confusion on Google's part and is going to hurt you in the long run. Google says they prefer HTTPS and I've seen evidence of that. You're already paying for an SSL so you might as well use it to the max.

As Laura said, if you've got self-referring canonical tags on both secure and non-secure URLs, you're setting yourself up for some pretty big issues.

[BasKierkels]

Hi Jacob,

I understand the issue. I think that this way you're not making a decision where you really should:
Either you use non-ssl or either you use ssl. To continue with the both is a terrible situation: nobody really knows what the they are supposed to know.

For instance: is it possible that someone starts on the thomepage (non-ssl), goes to a product page (ssl) and then to the shopping cart which is again non-ssl? If that is the case you should really check your conversion rate because that in itself might be very damaging as well.

Yours,
Bas

[LauraSultan]

When you say you currently have self referencing canonicals, is the following happening?

The page http://example.com is canonicalized to http://example.com.

The page https://example.com is canonicalized to https://example.com.

If so, this is the bigger problem because Google sees these as 2 different URLs and may index both of them. Furthermore, you could be splitting backlinks between 2 URLs unnecessarily. This duplicate issue may be part of the reason you saw organic traffic drop when you launched your new site.

If the HTTPS URLs are already being indexed by Google, go ahead and canonicalize the http URLs to the https URLs. In other words, http://example.com will canonicalize to https://example.com.

By setting up the canonical this way, Google will fold the two URLs together and correctly treat them as the same page.

[Jacobsheehan]

Good morning Laura,

Thanks for the advice.

I've replied below to Logan giving a little context. If you could take a look and let me know your thoughts it would be a huge help.

[Jacobsheehan]

Hi again Logan,

I've tossed up whether or not to make the full switch to https for a while now. I'll give you a little background so you understand my position:

When our new website launched, our organic search traffic took a dip of around 15%. It has taken around two months for it to recover (almost). We changed site structure out of necessity but followed best practise to ensure we didn't undo alot of the work we had done with the old website. With the 15% organic rankings dip we saw a corresponding dip in revenue, so what I don't want to do is muddy the waters anymore than they already are by adding more moving parts to the mix (migration / redesign / http to https). And we cannot risk another dip in revenue so close to the first which may come with a full https migration (do you think?).

This is why I'm leaning toward replicating what we had in place on the old website and only forcing https on the necessary pages.

Now that you understand my position, would you still recommend the switch to https? I would love to know your thoughts.

The catch with all of this is I'm not sure exactly how the http https was implemented on the old website. At that point in time I had no need to know.

We currently have self referencing canonicals which you know we need to maintain, particularly on product pages which use URL parameters. We are also using relative links across the entire website.

Therefore, what would be the best solution here? Down the rabbit hole we go...

Thanks for your time,

[LoganRay]

Hi Jacob,

Cyrus Shepard put together a great guide on HTTPS migrations. Since you've already got an SSL, you may as well apply it to the whole site and set your preferred domain as HTTPS (as Laura and Bas mentioned). In the guide, he details the best ways to ensure search engines index the version you want via 301 redirect rules, canonical tags, and XML sitemaps. Don't forget to set up Search Console properties for HTTPS - www and non-www versions and set your preferred domain there as well.

Run this query in Google to monitor what they've got in their index as the canonical domain: info:mountainjade.co.nz

[BasKierkels]

Agree with Laura: better to let the https be indexed. Nice links by the way for this topic.

Bas

[LauraSultan]

In your case, the best thing to do is set up canonical tags to let Google know which version of the URL should be indexed. That way, it doesn't matter if Google can access the https page, and you won't have the duplicate content problem that you have now.

I can't advise you on the best way to set this up with Drupal, but you'll need to be wary of any type of automatic canonical tags. You may end up with an "http" canonical link on the http page and an "https" canonical link on the https page. That doesn't solve the problem at all.

If you are not already familiar with canonical tags, you can learn more at the links below.

• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
• https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
• https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

By the way, I would set it up so that Google indexes the https version of your pages rather than the http version.