Home Page Got Indexed as httpS and Rankings Went Down.

[ddseo]

Hello fellow SEO's

About 3 weeks ago all of a sudden the home page on our Magento based website went down in rankings (from top 10 to page 3-4 Google) and was showing as httpS - instead of usual http.

It first happened with just a few keywords and a week later any search phrase was returning the httpS result for the home page.

When I view cache for the home page now it (both http and httpS versions) it gives me this http://clip2net.com/s/2OtPS

• We are not blocking anything in robots.txt
• Robots tags are set to index,follow
• There are hardly any external links pointing at the home pages as httpS

This only affected the home page - all other pages rank where they used to and appear as http

Has anybody ever had a similar problem? Thanks in advance for your thoughts and help

[donford]

Hi ddseo,

I think you need to prevent the indexing of https pages.

One method is to create a SSL only robots.txt

like

RewriteEngine on Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ^443$ RewriteRule ^robots.txt$ robots_ssl.txt

This will redirect anything hitting the https port 443 to the robots_ssl.txt  else it sends them to the standard robots.txt file. The robots_ssl.txt file would just block everything like...

User-agent: * Disallow: /

Since you're running Magneto there is likely other solutions, like using mod_rewrite in htaccess, the magneto platform is fairly well supported so simple SEO issues like this may get some quality responses on their official forums.

Hope this helps

Don

[ddseo]

Thank you very much Don, we'll go ahead and add that!

There's also a plugin for magento that adds noindex,nofollow for all httpS pages.

[donford]

Great to hear DDseo, glad I helped.  You may mark good answers and / or mark the topic answered.

Cheers