Https Loss of Search traffic

[Johnny_AppleSeed]

Hey guys,

We moved our site to from http to https. We subsequently lost 25% in our search traffic in 1 Month. We changed a few other pieces such as images, added new content etc.

Has anyone got any suggestions on how we start to understand what happened?

Thanks in advance.

[TomRayner]

Hi John

The first thing I would ask in this situation is - did you 301 redirect the non SSL (http) versions of your pages to the SSL (https)?

If you didn't - that could be a big problem.  First of all, that could run into a couple of duplicate content issues and canonical issues, as you would have two versions of each page battling each other for prominence.  However, what I think would be more of an issue is the fact that if you didn't redirect the pages and if you didn't change any of your inbound links - the links that you had pointing to the website might now be pointing to inactive pages, and the link 'equity' your site had may now be lost.

This might be a redundant point as you may have implemented the redirects - but it's always the first thing that I look out for.

If you're looking to redirect all of the http pages, this bit of code is something you can add to your htaccess file to redirect all URLs on your site:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

Again, apologies if you have already done this but if not, I hope it helps.

[RyanPurkey]

To follow up on Tom's great response, even with the 301 redirect in place, you could still be experiencing the delay typical to redirection. Pinging the new domain may help you speed up that process. To do so create a list of the site pages and submit them to PingFarm and 247pinger. Those will help to verify the new site and de-index the old URLs.

Also, as a reference, here's Google's over view of transitioning to HTTPS: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543. Cheers!

[Johnny_AppleSeed]

Hi Tom,

Thanks a million for the great answer. I missed that in my description, we have added in 301 redirects for all links but still saw a drop. My apologies, I left that out initially.

We have also identified that we are missing a number of H1's and have changed our title tags.

[Johnny_AppleSeed]

Hey Ryan,

Thanks for the answer and the link, We will add it to that pingfarm. Thanks guys but we need to make sure this is in order.

[RyanPurkey]

Great! It sounds like you're on the right track John, especially considering that there are some title and H1 changes took place. Cheers!

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi

I can see that Tom and Ryan have done a great job of handling the most obvious issue that may have caused your site to drop in terms of changing to HTTPS. You have also mentioned the fact that you have changed some significant on-page factors which could definitely be the culprit.

However I thought I would just add this - I saw someone move to HTTPS and they did implement the correct redirects and then register both versions of the site in webmaster tools and so on. However they still saw a noticeable drop in their organic traffic which turned out to be caused by a significant drop in site speed after moving to HTTPS.

You may have already checked and your site may seem fast but I would double check the speed of your site with Google Page Speed Insights and GTMetrix (another speed tool I like). If your site seems slow look at what you can do to improve it with the recommendations on these tools (as this will help your site whatever) - also speak to your host and explain you are seeing a decrease in speed can they help.

This tactic worked in this case and I just thought I would mention it as another angle to approach this.

Hope this helps!

[Bio-RadAbs]

I would also set up your HTTPS site as a new one in Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools (Bing automatically does it), but set it up in GWT. Once you have done that, make sure your sitemap is added and crawled again.

Get GWT to crawl the sitemap again from your non HTTPS account too, so redirects are recorded.