HTTPS sitewide move has resulted in huge rankings drop...

[Whittie]

Hi all,

An e-commerce site has recently moved protocol to https sitewide.

The site ranked page one for some great terms and now appear to be page 2 or below. Brand terms seem unphased and are still very strong, on both Google and Bing.

The following has been done;

• Everything 301'd from http to https
• Sitemap Edited
• Updated Webmaster Tools
• Robots.txt edited
• Crawled and Fetched all pages daily.
• Checked Paged are all follow,index.
• PPC Ads mass updated to new url's.

Most terms were ranked 1 - 9 on Bing, and Page 1/2 on Google.

HTTPS upgrade was done less than one week ago. The site is not payday loan related, nor was it hit by latest panda escapades. Everything on the site is relevant to the content.

Has anybody else been in this position, what else can be done?

I'd appreciate any help and advice. Thank You

K9gB7hz

[SamuelScott]

Search Engine Roundtable has an article on the topic here that cites a Google+ discussion with Google's John Muller here.

Some potential issues that are discussed:

• don't forget the http->https redirect & other canonicalization things
• look into HSTS
• list the https site separately in webmaster tools (it's a different site)
• make sure the infrastructure can handle the higher load (SSL, caching, etc)
• check out the differences wrt. caching

I'd also look at past Q&As here and here. I hope this helps -- good luck!

[Whittie]

Hi Samuel,

Thanks for replying, I have however been on the above links before posting.

The points John Mueller mentioned were previously addressed, yet rankings have taken a colossal turn for the worse.

In the second link you posted i'm hoping this statement comes true!
"In our experience, even when 301's are correctly executed, we see a short term fall back (7-30) days and then about a 90% carry through after that period for about 90 days and then back to full strength. "

Alex

[LesleyPaone]

How long has it been since you switched? It might be a little late now, but the way I always recommend doing it to my clients is to activate the https site and leave the http one active for a few weeks. That way you can have the canonical on the http point to https. Google does not act immediately on things, you have to give them time to adjust and I feel this works best.

[Whittie]

One week ago. Would that not cause duplicate content? I thought about doing it that way round, but was a little worried about duplicating the whole site. (In hindsight it couldn't have been any worse)

Thank you for your reply.

[LesleyPaone]

It will cause duplicated content, that is why you add the canonical tag that points to the https site. What you are doing is waiting for Google to react to your address change and covering your bases while you are waiting. Google is big, things like address changes don't happen overnight, they could take weeks to fully index correctly. Risking a little duplicate content to me is worth not having the traffic drop off of a site.

[Whittie]

One week on and brand terms have gone the exact same way. We're on page 2 for our brand, yet dominated page one with 5-6 links before this https move. With absolutely no glimmer of hope for our organic terms.

None of the keywords which were been worked on (and getting results with) are getting anywhere,

I know and understand it is a waiting game to get the rankings back, however it is painful to see the rankings in such a state.

Can anybody recommend further steps to give the site a boost?

This article from Rand fascinates me, and gives some potential light at the end of the tunnel for a quick fix! http://moz.com/rand/queries-clicks-influence-googles-results/

Thanks in advance

[JaneCopland]

This indicates to me that something is wrong besides waiting for a 301 redirect situation to be properly indexed / acknowledged. This is not currently a ranking factor, but there have even been murmurings of Googlers favouring HTTPS sites - it's certainly a plus to be on HTTPS URLs in Matt Cutts' opinion - http://www.seroundtable.com/google-ssl-ranking-18256.html

At the very least, the move should not hurt you, especially not for brand terms two weeks later.

Unfortunately I am really not sure what the problem is likely to be, assuming that everything about the redirection has been done by the book and you are not seeing any errors on that front. A continued drop might warrant a request for reconsideration, but that is a last-ditch effort in most cases.

[Whittie]

5 weeks on, and the site is still recovering.

Obviously during this time Google announced its preferred status to HTTPS sites too!

Only yesterday did we return top for the brand name,.

To put a figure on how much damage has been caused on this matter, organic traffic (Google only) was down 35%, and organic revenue (Google only) Y-O-Y last month was down 60%.

Would love to know the reasoning for the huge drop in rankings, and the recovery time period to expect.

[MarketingGH]

Hiya,

I wondered if your site has recovered fully now and how long it took for it to do so?

Many thanks!

[Whittie]

Hi,

It took roughly 4 months to fully recover.

The dent in the graph doesn't look that significant, but the spike towards Christmas is way into the 300,000 mark..

Paid traffic paid a valuable part in keeping traffic steady (as you can see).

Regards

Alex

fP0haB7

[MarketingGH]

Thanks for that! It helps me understand what the risks may be in doing this now. Am I wrong in deducing you had a long-term positive gain overall?

Thanks!

[Whittie]

It's very hard to pinpoint whether doing it had a positive affect. I'm going to say if it did, it was extremely minimal. It's 'nice' for site visitors to see the site is verified I guess.

I'd still do it again, as Google said it's worthwhile. Just a shame it's taken so long, and we couldn't measure success of failure.

I've done it on another site since, which was far smoother, rankings and traffic remained the same though.

[MarketingGH]

Thanks very much for your feedback! It helps a lot.