Domain Level Redirects - HTTP and HTTPS

[Satans_Apprentice]

About 2 years ago (well before I started with the company), we did an http=>https migration. It was not done correctly. The http=>https redirect was never inserted into the .htaccess file. In essence, we have 2 websites. According to Google search console, we have 19,000 HTTP URLs indexed and 9,500 HTTPS URLs indexed.

I've done a larger scale http=>https migration (60,000 SKUs), and our rankings dropped significantly for 6-8 weeks. We did this the right way, using sitemaps, and http and https GSC properties. Google came out recently and said that this type of rankings drop is normal for large sites.

I need to set the appropriate expectations for management. Questions:

1. How badly is the domain split affecting our rankings, if at all? Our rankings aren't bad, but I believe we are underperforming our backlink profile. Can we expect a net rankings gain when the smoke clears? There are a number of other technical SEO issues going on as well.
2. How badly will our rankings drop (temporarily) and for how long when we add the redirect to the .htaccess file?
3. Is there a way to mitigate the rankings impact? For example, only submitting partial sitemaps to our GSC http property?

Has anyone gone through this before?

[ChrisHallUK]

Interesting Answer Paul,

I am currently in a similar boat, just a lot smaller situation, but we haven't indexed our https pages with Google Search Console yet, currently fixing errors with our site first.  Should I finishing fixing our http page and then do an https redirect and then remove the sitemaps from the http search console or will google be clever enough to realise?

Regards

Chris

[ThompsonPaul]

Google has said that when they find the same page under both HTTP and HTTPS, they will try to return the HTTPS page in search (certain circumstances ap[ply). But the fact remains that you are making the search engines "figure it out" instead of giving explicit directives that ensure the correct behaviour.

I suspect the HTTPS split has already done its damage, especially with regards to backlinks now pointing at two destinations and thus splitting the authority. Which is likely the cause for your suspicion of the underperforming backlink profile.

So the process of getting the HTTP dupe resolved to HTTPS with the redirect should start delivering improvement as soon as the new crawling/indexing gets done. I strongly suspect this improvement will offset most if not all of the effect of the new HTTPS redirects.

There's no way to estimate the effect of the addition of the proper HTTPS redirect, but given that you're already in a compromised hybrid state, my strong suspicion is that it will actually improve the situation without much temporary drop at all. In essence, you've already experienced the negative pressure. The changes will serve to start to reduce the negative pressure immediately.

But this is my best assumptions. I haven't done an HTTPS redirect correction on such a large site. On the smaller sites I've fixed though, the uptick happened within a week or two. Though not dramatic improvements still beneficial.

The other thing to be aware of: Google has stated that when they do the reindexing to HTTPS, it's essentially like recrawling a new site. So they apply all the tests and quality checks to all pages. So if you have existing issues to clean up, do that before final implementation of the HTTPS redirect.

I'd be really interested to follow your results on this - sounds like a solid opportunity for a case study!

Hope that helps;

Paul