Landing pages showing up as HTTPS when we haven't made the switch

[znotes]

Hi Moz Community,

Recently our tech team has been taking steps to switch our site from http to https. The tech team has looked at all SEO redirect requirements and we're confident about this switch, we're not planning to roll anything out until a month from now.

However, I recently noticed a few https versions of our landing pages showing up in search. We haven't pushed any changes out to production yet so this shouldn't be happening. Not all of the landing pages are https, only a select few and I can't see a pattern. This is messing up our GA and Search Console tracking since we haven't fully set up https tracking yet because we were not expecting some of these pages to change.

HTTPS has always been supported on our site but never indexed so it's never shown up in the search results. I looked at our current site and it looks like landing page canonicals are already pointing to their https version, this may be the problem.

Anyone have any other ideas?

[iugac]

Hi! I don't seem to understand the question. Is it that you added a https rel canonical to live pages and are wondering why it is indexed? If so, this is the normal behavior since your website already supports https and you have linked to it. The reason why only a few landing pages  show up as https for now might be related to how and when the crawler got there. I hope I didn't totally misunderstand the question.

[znotes]

Hi Christian,

Thanks for the reply. HTTPS rel canonical were added to live pages, as I expected this is why some are showing up in the search results. It's a problem through for GA and Search console tracking since we haven't made the switch server side yet and currently http pages don't redirect to their https version yet. So we're seeing no sessions for our http versions.

If I change the rel=canonical back to http on the live site I'm guessing the non secure pages will show up again after being crawled?

Thanks!

[iugac]

What I would do is the following: change the rel canonical back, remove the https version from Search Console (you need to add the https version of the website as well in Search Console) and then fetch and reindex the http version (also from Search Console). So basically, help Google understand this mistake and go back to the http version. Also, check your sitemaps and be sure that you are not including https links there. Hope this helps.