Huge Search Traffic Drop After Switching to HTTPS - No Recovery After Couple of Months
-
Hi
In November, we have switched our website (https://www.insidermonkey.com) from HTTP to HTTPS. Initially, we noticed slight search traffic loss but later discovered it might be due to HTTPS switch. A month later we added the https version at search console, and then saw an immediate huge drop (about 25-30%).
We discovered the problem might be due to poor redirection and noticed our redirects were 302s instead of 301s. To fix the problem, we implemented the 301 redirects and submitted the sitemap containing links to the old site at the new search console property (https). We've gone through points listed on the page below:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543
- We fixed the redirects to 301
- Double-checked the sitemaps
- Made sure we had a properly installed SSL certificate (Now, we get A+ from https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.insidermonkey.com)
- Made sure we have no mixed-content errors (we don't have any issues at search console.)
We only avoided implementing HSTS, in case we might want to switch back to HTTP.
We had a small improvement in the following month, but our traffic did not fully recover. We wanted to test for the possibility to switch back HTTP by switching only 2 articles in our CMS to HTTP. Our traffic got worse, not only for those but for the whole site. Then we switched back those 2 articles to HTTPS again and implemented HSTS.It seems our search traffic getting worse day by day with no sign of improving.
In the link below you can find the screenshot of our weekly search traffic between 1 October - 1 March. We are down from 500K weekly visitors to mere 167K last week.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Y1TQbj_YtGG4NhLORbEWbvITUkGKUa0G
Any ideas or suggestions? We are willing to get professional help as well. What is the way to find a proper consultant for such problem with relevant experience?
-
Hi etakgoz,
That's a huge drop. I've actually seen a similar drop in traffic before in the past, specifically due to a site redirection issue and also Google Penguin penalties. What caused a mis-diagnosis for me in the past was that our site redirection happened at almost the same time as Google core algorithm changes during the same period.
Have you taken a look at the algorithm change timelines to see if it's possibly an external factor that caused the drop in traffic?
Other than that, did you have any tracking tools or software similar to Moz that you were using to keep track of site issues or the backlink profile? The decrease in traffic is pretty severe and there could be a multitude of issues possibly causing this. Was there a similar decrease in search rankings along the same period of time as well?
Sorry for the questions, but it'll really help if you could provide more details for further diagnosis.
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
-
HTTPS during or after redesign
Performing a website redesign and with that we are going to be deindexing a lot of pages and make big changes to the site architecture. With all of these big changes happening with the redesign, should we include the change to https during the redesign or about 4-6 months after? If we do it after we will have time to diagnose any shortcomings of the redesign. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Trent.Warner0 -
Bolded words in search results
are those synonyms or semantically related keywords ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
HTTP to HTTPS Question
Hello, I have a question regarding SSL Certificates I think I know the answer to but wanted to make sure. One of our clients’ site uses http for their pages but when they started creating Registration forms they created a full duplicate site on https (so now there are two versions of all of the pages). I know due to duplicate concerns this could be an issue and needs to resolved (as well as the pros and cons of both) but if they are already set up with https does it make sense to just move everything there or in some instances would it pay to keep some pages http (using canonical tags, redirects, htccess…etc)? – Most of the information I found related to making the decision prior to having both or describing the process but I couldn’t find anything that specifically related to if both are already present. I thought that the best approach because everything’s already set up is to just move everything over to the more secure one but was curious if anybody had any insight? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R0 -
Sudden inexplicable drop in important keywords
I have been running around in small circles trying to work out why, after a year of careful SEO my companies site has suddenly dropped for all it's main keywords out of the first page to the second or third in our weekly report. One theory was that five backlinks with a spam rating of 10 might have had an impact - these have been removed, but I have been advised that these may not have been the cause. Our crawl diagnostics remain squeaky clean. I add one, carefully checked and optimized (as per Moz recommendations) blog posts once a week and nothing has been changed other than that. We have slowly and carefully built up a good backlink profile, but as well as the drop in rankings our weekly report also showed that we lost 109 backlinks from the previous week. I have not been able to find out what I could possibly have done wrong! I've checked all our crawl reports and webmaster tools and nothing has been flagged up. I did discover, whilst typing in some longtail keyword phrases that our preview site URLs as well as our live site URLs appeared in SERPs. I checked with our web agency who assured me that this was fine, but that they had put a redirect on these yesterday. I thought this was a bit strange as that seems odd as we have been live for a year. I guess my question is could the fact that these redirects have not been active (until yesterday) have any bearing on what has happened or is this completely unrelated? Thanks Catherine - very stressed Mozer 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO_Selectaglaze1 -
Traffic dropped suddenly
-In early January 2013, we had to switch servers after many years with the same one. We were highly ranked and getting about 8500 unique visitors per month. -We didn't notice the traffic falling because we were focussed on a major site redesign and addition that we launched in April 2013. Visits continued to fall, this time also because the company that launched it didn't double check their work and had some dead links etc. Those were all fixed by approximately June 2013.- early January 2014 we switched servers again because we were afraid the new server we moved to was perhaps ranked poorly or was possibly a spamming site before. Currently, nothing has changed. What was about 8500 unique visitors per month 18 months ago, is now about 1,000 and no leads are coming in at all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HasitR0 -
Significant drop in web rankings
We have two websites and last week we had a significant drop in search engine rankings. Some of these search rankings we have been top 3 for the past 5 years and now we are not in the top 20. Last weekend we changed our hosting provider and IP addresses for the first time in over 7 years. Now is there a way we could work out if we have been hit by the latest Penguin update or if the change in hosting / IP has caused these drop in rankings? I would appreciate any thought or ideas at all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacksons_Fencing0 -
Penguin recovery - Any suggestions?
Hey Guys. To be honest i havent heard about any case of penguin recovery yet except from the famous WMPU revocery (if u ask me it dosent count really) Any way I own a few sites.. that got hit by Penguin. I did remove 90% of the "suspected as bad links" and apply to google reconsideration. in return i got an answer after a few days from google saying :"We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.... and so on" So what they saying is that the engine still think that your links are spammy.. what should i do?? i truy removed most of the links but homepage isnt really showing any progress.. he is just no where.. Idaes? Case Studies?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Idoz0 -
Traffic has dropped off a cliff
I just spent thousands of $$ redesigning my site. Have a Wordpress site now with Yoast SEO. However, my organic traffic has dropped of a cliff. Can any of you help me figure out why? www.UltimateBasicTraining.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StreetwiseReports1