Google Indexing Of Pages As HTTPS vs HTTP
-
We recently updated our site to be mobile optimized. As part of the update, we had also planned on adding SSL security to the site. However, we use an iframe on a lot of our site pages from a third party vendor for real estate listings and that iframe was not SSL friendly and the vendor does not have that solution yet. So, those iframes weren't displaying the content.
As a result, we had to shift gears and go back to just being http and not the new https that we were hoping for.
However, google seems to have indexed a lot of our pages as https and gives a security error to any visitors. The new site was launched about a week ago and there was code in the htaccess file that was pushing to www and https. I have fixed the htaccess file to no longer have https.
My questions is will google "reindex" the site once it recognizes the new htaccess commands in the next couple weeks?
-
That's not going to solve your problem, vikasnwu. Your immediate issue is that you have URLs in the index that are HTTPS and will cause searchers who click on them not to reach your site due to the security error warnings. The only way to fix that quickly is to get the SSL certificate and redirect to HTTP in place.
You've sent the search engines a number of very conflicting signals. Waiting while they try to work out what URLs they're supposed to use and then waiting while they reindex them is likely to cause significant traffic issues and ongoing ranking harm before the SEs figure it out for themselves. The whole point of what I recommended is it doesn't depend on the SEs figuring anything out - you will have provided directives that force them to do what you need.
Paul
-
Remember you can force indexing using Google Search Console
-
Nice answer!
But you forgot to mention:
- Updating the sitemap files with the good URLs
- Upload them to Google Search Console
- You can even force the indexing at Google Search Console
Thanks,
Roberto
-
Paul,
I just provided the solution to de-index the https version. I understood that what's wanted, as they need their client to fix their end.And of course that there is no way to noindex by protocol. I do agree what you are saying.
Thanks a lot for explaining further and prividing other ways to help solvinf the issue, im inspired by used like you to help others and make a great community.
GR.
-
i'm first going to see what happens if I just upload a sitemap with http URLs since there wasn't a sitemap in webmaster tools from before. Will give you the update then.
-
Great! I'd really like to hear how it goes when you get the switch back in.
P.
-
Paul that does make sense - i'll add the SSL certificate back, and then redirect from https to http via the htaccess file.
-
You can't noindex a URL by protocol, Gaston - adding no-index would eliminate the page from being returned as a search result regardless of whether HTTP or HTTPS, essentially making those important pages invisible and wasting whatever link equity they may have. (You also can't block in robots.txt by protocol either, in my experience.)
-
There's a very simple solution to this issue - and no, you absolutely do NOT want to artificially force removal of those HTTPS pages from the index.
You need to make sure the SSL certificate is still in place, then re-add the 301-redirect in the site's htaccess file, but this time redirecting all HTTPS URLs back their HTTP equivalents.
You don't want to forcibly "remove" those URLs from the SERPs, because they are what Google now understands to be the correct pages. If you remove them, you'll have to wait however long it takes for Google and other search engines to completely re-understand the conflicting signals you've sent them about your site. And traffic will inevitably suffer in that process. Instead, you need to provide standard directives that the search engines don't have to interpret and can't ignore. Once the search engines have seen the new redirects for long enough, they'll start reverting the SERP listings back to the HTTP URLs naturally.
The key here is the SSL cert must stay in place. As it stands now, a visitor clicking a page in the search engine is trying to make an HTTPS connection to your site. If there is no certificate in place, they will get the harmful security warning. BUT! You can't just put in a 301-redirect in that case. The reason for this is that the initial connection from the SERP is coming in over the "secure channel". That connection must be negotiated securely first, before the redirect can even be read. If that first connection isn't secure, the browser will return the security warning without ever trying to read the redirect.
Having the SSL cert in place even though you're not running all pages under HTTPS means that first connection can still be made securely, then the redirect can be read back to the HTTP URL, and the visitor will get to the page they expect in a seamless manner. And search engines will be able to understand and apply authority without misunderstandings/confusion.
Hope that all makes sense?
Paul
-
Noup, Robots.txt works on a website level. This means that there has to be a file for the http and another for the https website.
And, there is no need for waiting until the whole site is indexed.Just to clarify, robots.txt itself does not remove pages already indexed. It just blocks bots from crawling a website and/or specific pages with in it.
-
GR - thanks for the response.
Given our site is just 65 pages, would it make sense to just put all of the site's "https" URLs in the robots.txt file as "noindex" now rather than waiting for all the pages to get indexed as "https" and then remove them?
And then upload a sitemap to webmaster tools with the URLS as "http://"?
VW
-
Hello vikasnwu,
As what you are looking for is to remove from index the pages, follow this steps:
- Allow the whole website to be crawable in the robots.txt
- add the robots meta tag with "noindex,follow" parametres
- wait several weeks, 6 to 8 weeks is a fairly good time. Or just do a followup on those pages
- when you got the results (all your desired pages to be de-indexed) re-block with robots.txt those pages
- DO NOT erase the meta robots tag.
Remember that http://site.com andhttps://site.com are different websites to google.
When your client's website is fixed with https, follow these steps:- Allow the whole website (or the parts wanted to be indexed) to be crawable in robots.txt
- Remove the robots meta tag
- Redirect 301 http to https
- Sit and wait.
Information about the redirection to HTTPS and a cool checklist:
The Big List of SEO Tips and Tricks for Using HTTPS on Your Website - Moz Blog
The HTTP to HTTPs Migration Checklist in Google Docs to Share, Copy & Download - AleydaSolis
Google SEO HTTPS Migration Checklist - SERoundtableHope I'm helpful.
Best luck.
GR.
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
-
Why does Google display the home page rather than a page which is better optimised to answer the query?
I have a page which (I believe) is well optimised for a specific keyword (URL, title tag, meta description, H1, etc). yet Google chooses to display the home page instead of the page more suited to the search query. Why is Google doing this and what can I do to stop it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Homepage meta title not indexing correctly on google
Hello everyone! We're having a spot of trouble with our website www.whichledlight.com The meta title is coming up wrong on google. In Google it currently reads out
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup
'Which LED Light: LED Bulbs & Lamps Compared'
when it should be
'LED Bulbs & Lamps Compared | Which LED Light' Last snapshot of the page from google was yesterday (5th April 2016) Anyone got any ideas?
Is all the markup correct in the ?0 -
Google indexing pages from chrome history ?
We have pages that are not linked from site yet they are indexed in Google. It could be possible if Google got these pages from browser. Does Google takes data from chrome?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
How do you check the google cache for hashbang pages?
So we use http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:x.com/#!/hashbangpage to check what googlebot has cached but when we try to use this method for hashbang pages, we get the x.com's cache... not x.com/#!/hashbangpage That actually makes sense because the hashbang is part of the homepage in that case so I get why the cache returns back the homepage. My question is - how can you actually look up the cache for hashbang page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | navidash0 -
Adding Orphaned Pages to the Google Index
Hey folks, How do you think Google will treat adding 300K orphaned pages to a 4.5 million page site. The URLs would resolve but there would be no on site navigation to those pages, Google would only know about them through sitemap.xmls. These pages are super low competition. The plot thickens, what we are really after is to get 150k real pages back on the site, these pages do have crawlable paths on the site but in order to do that (for technical reasons) we need to push these other 300k orphaned pages live (it's an all or nothing deal) a) Do you think Google will have a problem with this or just decide to not index some or most these pages since they are orphaned. b) If these pages will just fall out of the index or not get included, and have no chance of ever accumulating PR anyway since they are not linked to, would it make sense to just noindex them? c) Should we not submit sitemap.xml files at all, and take our 150k and just ignore these 300k and hope Google ignores them as well since they are orhpaned? d) If Google is OK with this maybe we should submit the sitemap.xmls and keep an eye on the pages, maybe they will rank and bring us a bit of traffic, but we don't want to do that if it could be an issue with Google. Thanks for your opinions and if you have any hard evidence either way especially thanks for that info. 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw0 -
How important is the number of indexed pages?
I'm considering making a change to using AJAX filtered navigation on my e-commerce site. If I do this, the user experience will be significantly improved but the number of pages that Google finds on my site will go down significantly (in the 10,000's). It feels to me like our filtered navigation has grown out of control and we spend too much time worrying about the url structure of it - in some ways it's paralyzing us. I'd like to be able to focus on pages that matter (explicit Category and Sub-Category) pages and then just let ajax take care of filtering products below these levels. For customer usability this is smart. From the perspective of manageable code and long term design this also seems very smart -we can't continue to worry so much about filtered navigation. My concern is that losing so many indexed pages will have a large negative effect (however, we will reduce duplicate content and be able provide much better category and sub-category pages). We probably should have thought about this a year ago before Google indexed everything :-). Does anybody have any experience with this or insight on what to do? Thanks, -Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cre80 -
Forced Trailing Slash on PHP Pages In Google!
Hi, have never seen this before so am hoping soemone can shed some light! Google seems to be forcing a trailing slash at the end of our php pages within the search results. For example, Google is indexing http://www.kingstoncabinets.co.uk/heat-convection.php/ (trailing slash) rather than http://www.kingstoncabinets.co.uk/heat-convection.php (without slash). The trailing slash page doesn't display properly and has no page authority. I've ran the site through Screaming Frog and there are no internal links the the trailing slash URL's, nor does there seem to be any external links to these pages. Why is Google forcing the slash? Am confused 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webpresence0 -
Google indexing issue?
Hey Guys, After a lot of hard work, we finally fixed the problem on our site that didn't seem to show Meta Descriptions in Google, as well as "noindex, follow" on tags. Here's my question: In our source code, I am seeing both Meta descriptions on pages, and posts, as well as noindex, follow on tag pages, however, they are still showing the old results and tags are also still showing in Google search after about 36 hours. Is it just a matter of time now or is something else wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ttb0