Moving to TLS and disavow file
-
I'm considering the move to TLS/SSL obviously will be setting up the version in Search Console, do I need to re-upload the disavowal file previously generated before the move?
Look forward to your response.
-
I appreciate your comprehensive article, However, may I kindly point out my question was to do with Disavow in Google Search Console, Not the implementation of secure.
-
1. Get and Install Certificates
Buy a 2048-bit TLS/SSL SHA-2 secure certificate from a Certificate Authority (CA)
Generate some documents so that the CA can issue a signed certificate
Send the CA what they need (your public key and certificate signing request)
Install certificates on your servers
2. Enable HTTPS on Your Servers
Configure your server for HTTPS. Check out these configuration tips for popular servers.
Test properly functioning using an external testing tool. Here’s a good one.
Set a reminder to update your secure certificate before it expires.
3. Code & Configuration Changes
Update site content to request https resources
Update internal links to point to https pages or consider making internal links relative
Use protocol relative URIs. Example: (see note below)
Add self-referencing rel canonical tag to every page, pointing to your HTTPS URIs
Change all Ad calls to work with HTTPS
Update any internal tools, such as Optimizely or CrazyEgg, to work with HTTPS
Update legacy redirects to eliminate chained redirects (see note below)
Update OpenGraph, Schema, Semantic markup etc. to point to HTTPS
Update social sharing buttons to preserve share counts
4. Robots.txt, XML Sitemaps, Search Console and Analytics
Create and verify a new property for the HTTPS site in Google Search Console
Create a new XML sitemap file that points to your HTTPS URLs and upload it to the new property in Search Console
Create a new robots.txt file for the HTTPS site and copy over all existing rules. Include a Sitemap link to the new HTTPS XML sitemap.
Remove all rules from the HTTP robots.txt file, except for the Sitemap link, and leave it in place. This is to encourage bots to crawl and follow all redirects.
Copy any existing disavow file and upload it to the new HTTPS property in Search Console
Note: Don’t use the “Change of Address” feature in Google Search Console. That’s used for migrations to new domains.
5. Redirect HTTP to HTTPs
Deploy the redirect code
Redirect HTTP to HTTPS on IIS (7.x and higher)
Redirect HTTP to HTTPS on Apache
Redirect HTTP to HTTPS on Nginx
Include exceptions to any global redirect directives for your existing robots.txt and XML sitemap files
6. Follow-Up (after the release)
Use a tools, like SSL Check, to scan your site for non-secure content
Check HTTPS redirects and legacy redirects to ensure they work correctly. Check for long redirect chains using a tools that captures the header responses (I like Redirect Path by Ayima). Check for proper redirect functionality from both www and non-www, with and without trailing slashes, etc.
Use “Fetch as Google” tool and submit your Home page and other key pages to speed up the indexing process. I use the “Crawl this URL and its direct links” option.
Monitor the Index Status report in Search Console. The HTTP property should eventually go to zero, and the HTTPS should increase. Take this a step further by calculating the indexation rates of each XML sitemap and monitor them over time.
Monitor the Crawl Errors report in Search Console and address errors, as appropriate
When most new (HTTPS) URLs are already indexed, remove the legacy sitemap link from Robots.txt
Update incoming links that are within your control to point to HTTPS (eg. links to your site from social media profiles)
7. Turn on Strict Transport Security (HSTS)
Once you’re absolutely sure the entire site is working with HTTPS, use HSTS to improve performance by ensuring the browser “remembers” to send all requests to your site to https based on a policy you set. Keep in mind that this means your site will only use HTTPS, so make sure it works! (source).
here is another an good written guide for you.
-
Hey there,
You absolutely do need to. One of the biggest mistakes people make is not migrating their disavow file when they switch domains/encryptions.
Sean
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
-
Help to decide of domain move reversal after 5 months!
Hello, first sorry for my bad english,it isn't my first lanugage.
Technical SEO | | Milad25
I have a website with 13 years of history and activity. 5 Months ago we received an warning message from our domain provider which would seize our domain because of sanctions (i live in Iran), and they have seized many of iranian domains since then, therefore i have decided to quickly change my domain to another address so i could save my website as much as possible before they take out my domain...
I have moved my website successfully to a new domain address and have done everything necessary for a good domain move (301 all links, change template and...) I have also used the "Change of Address Tool" provided in google search console so google knows my new domain address and change all of my links...
Unfortunately 90% of my traffics comes from google, therefore we are hevaily depending on organic traffic.
Since i have changed my domain address my traffic has been declining, and now i have only 30% of the traffic input left from google compared to my old domain 5 months ago. (i had recently some SEO troubles too which could effect this decline even more)
Fortunately my old domain wasn't seized by the domain provider and i have successfully transfered it to another provide recently so there is no danger for my old domain anymore.
My question is, should i move my website back to my old domain (cancel the google "Change of Address Tool" and use it again to move the new domain back to the old domain)? My old domain has more than 13 Years of history,has many backlinks within this 13years, and till now, i cannot get good rankings with new posts on the new domain, sometimes google even does not index my new articles several days, but my old domain ranks still well (i have tested a new article on the old domain to see how it performs and it was not very good, but i think it ranks still better than my new domain).
My top pages and categories has been redirected successful and are still ranking well on google on the new domain address and hasn't been affected negativly, my main problem are new posts that are not ranking well o even does not get indexed for several days!
I don't know what to do now, are 5months not enough for google to completly transfer all domain scores from my old domain to the new one? Will all scores of my old domain even transfer to my old domain eventually? How about the many Backlinks i have pointed to the old domain? (which 90% i cannot change or ask to change to my new address) Will the backlinks scores pointing to the old domain transfer to the new domain?In other hand i fear to move my site back to the old domain because i don't know how google would behave, would all my seo score and rankings come back after i move back to the old domain? Also as far as i know, after 6months of using the google "Change of Address Tool" i cannot cancle the domain change anymore, therefore i have roughly 1 month to decide to cancle the move or not...
Please if anyone could help or guide me what to do it would be life saving for me, because my whole income and my family depends on my website... 😞0 -
Moving to old site to new domain sub directory
Hi, we've moved our old site to a new domain but in a subdirectory (the shopping site has been consolidated into overarching company website's shopping section, thus the move to sub dir). Are 301 redirects from old URLs to new domain's subdirectory ex newsite.com/shopping/page-1/ sufficient for site migration? I wasn't able to use Google's site address change tool since we're moving to a subdirectory on the new domain. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
Is this a Risky Blog Move?
I have a client who's thinking of placing their blog on a separate domain because the plug-ins and various other functionality is becoming bulky and slowing things down for the main site. There will be a 'Blog' link on the company's website navigation, just as there is now, that will take people to the blog. As an SEO person, this seems like a bad idea, even if we set up 301s from all the old posts to all the new ones. In my research I came across these two points: All backlinks to blog posts contribute directly to a website’s OVERALL SEO strength because those backlinks are pointing to your main domain. Removing them may reduce overall link juice to the site. Simply having fewer content pages on the site will cause entire site to rank lower because Google loves content-rich authority sites. Does anyone know this to be true for sure? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Caro-O
~Caro0 -
Disavowing links, Is it effective?
Looking for your experiences with disavowing back-links? We've been flooded with new clients who need spammy link removal services and wanted to hear more about your experience with the disavow tool. For sites that have been penalized, how long did it take for them to come back using the disavow tool? Did you see sites come back after the next algo update? Here's the basics of our services for link deletion: 1. Find all the spammy links
Technical SEO | | Keith-Eneix
2. Contact webmasters to delete them
3. Disavow all spammy links that are part of an obvious network
4. Implement a content plan for new quality links to get the site healthy again.
5. Report on all links removed and new links attained Just want to make sure our processes are in line with what everyone else is doing?0 -
Moving old Yahoo Store (since 2000) to Magento Enterprise. What are the pitfalls to be aware of?
What are the most dangerous things we should be aware of in moving an old domain from 2000 from Yahoo Store to Magento Enterprise, SEO wise? We know about setting up the 301s. Anything else we should be on top of? Site is www.EarphoneSolutions.com
Technical SEO | | Maduca0 -
SEO problems from moving from several pages to one accordian
Ive read other posts that say using accordion is not detrimental to SEO, and for conversion optimization we want to take several of our existing pages and make them into one accordion. But what will this do to seo and duplicate content as I redirect the old pages to anchors in the accordion? I would think this would be a dup content problem as www.oldinfo1 www.oldinfo2 will now have their content on the same page but I will be redirecting them to www.newpage#oldinfo1 www.newpage#oldinfo2 Is there a way around duplicate content problems?
Technical SEO | | JohnBerger0 -
.lbi file - SEO friendly or not?
Up until yesterday afternoon i had never heard of a .lbi file. It turns out it is a library file used by Adobe Dreamweaver. From what i can tell it works like a client side included but i am unsure of the technology behind it. The issue:
Technical SEO | | kchandler
When running through a recent SEO audit for a new client i found these .lbi files being used all over there site for site wide callouts and even navigation. When viewing this content through firebug or in the browser you can see the executed HTML content but when viewing the source or the page in seo-browser.com the content is nowhere to be seen. So my thought is this is not SEO friendly and is the same as displaying content in any client-side script like JavaScript or JQuery. Any feedback or thoughts on this subject would be awesome, especially if anyone has used these previously. Unfortunately i cannot share the client site but i would be more than happy to answer any questions if more detail is needed. Thanks in advance - Kyle0 -
Will moving a well established Blog to a different URL (on the same domain) affect the SERPs?
Hi SEOmoz experts, We will shortly be launching a new product range (B-Events) on our Events website and I was wondering if moving our current A-Events specific blog will impact the SERPs at all? Quite a few of our blog posts rank well for longtail A-Events terms, so we're a little reluctant to move it. But for the long term it makes more sense than creating & maintaining 2 separate blogs. Current Blog URL: domain.com/a-events/blog New Blog URL: domain.com/news New A-Events Category: domain.com/news/a-events New B-Events Category: domain.com/news/b-events I intend to 301 redirect all of the old URLs (200+) to their new blog category equivalent, will this be enough to keep their positions in the SERPs? Can you recommend / think of anything else, that we might not have considered. Any help would be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | RobertHill0