Google crawling but not indexing for no apparent reason

[alankoen123]

Client's site went secure about two months ago and chose root domain as rel canonical (so site redirects to https://rootdomain.com (no "www"). Client is seeing the site recognized and indexed by Google about every 3-5 days and then not indexed until they request a "Fetch". They've been going through this annoying process for about 3 weeks now.

Not sure if it's a server issue or a domain issue. They've done work to enhance .htaccess (i.e., the redirects) and robots.txt. If you've encountered this issue and have a recommendation or have a tech site or person resource to recommend, please let me know.

Google search engine results are respectable. One option would be to do nothing but then would SERPs start to fall without requesting a new Fetch?

Thanks in advance,

Alan

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[Lumina]

I suggest creating accounts in Google Search Console for BOTH www.websitename.com and websitename.com (without www.). Then, you'll be able to use these to tell Google which version you prefer. This isn't always necessary considering all you say you've done, but it looks like you've simply been unlucky with this. Using GSC for domain preference marking should help, if not solve the problem altogether.

[NickLeRoy]

I've seen people switch to secure HTTPS and forget to change their canonical values from http to HTTPS.   Something to double check.

[alankoen123]

Josh, Bryan and Nick:

Thanks for your excellent and timely responses. The problem appears to have been solved. There were redirects of the http versions of the site. These were removed and simply the redirect from https://www ... to https://... remains. Googlebot is now indexing pages as reported in Search Console. So, I'm keeping tabs but looks like problem is corrected. I used varvy.com/tools/redirects/ to verify. Thanks again!

[NickLeRoy]

Alan, I'm sure this goes without saying but please make sure there are 301 redirects from the http version to the HTTPS version otherwise your gonna have one hell of an organic traffic decline.