Messy older site

[SpodekandCo]

I am taking over a website that doesn't have any canonical tags and spotty redirects. It looks like they have http://, https://, www and non-www pages indexed but GA is just set up for the http://non-www home page. Should all versions of the site be set up in GA and Search Console? I think so but wanted to confirm. Thanks in advance.

[OddDog]

Before you get into the GA stuff, focus on fixing the core site architecture.  Use htaccess rules to force your website to only render a single version of your http, https, www, non-www versions.  You can either pick a favorite, or do a google search for the website name and see which version Google prioritizes and go with that.  Of course https is always recommended over just http.

Now that your site has a preferred version that the server forces it to, modify your existing Google Analytics profile to match just that version.  This way you can keep all your GA history.

Search console is a bit weird in that it may ask you to verify both the www and non-www versions of the website, which is recommended since subdomains can be different sites.  You can then set the preferred version in Search Console.

Hope that helps!

Adam
https://odd.dog

[WebQuest]

I would also recommend setting up all versions under Search Console (http, https, www, non-www, and domain property) as this gives you good insight into each version and how it's performing in SERPs, what pages are indexed, in addition to what domains are linking to each version.

You can use the domain property to see how the website is performing as a whole, or you can drill down to each version to see how (and if) it's ranking and/or indexed.

[SpodekandCo]

Thanks for your help. We are going to move the site and set up the architecture correctly but before we do that we need to find the top pages (which have the most page views) on Google Analytics but I can't figure out if GA is capturing all of the different variations of the pages. Does anyone know how I would do this?

[WebQuest]

If the GA tracking code is on the website, then it will capture the traffic regardless of whether GA is setup with the http or https version of the site.

You might also find this MOZ Question and its answers useful:

https://moz.com/community/q/will-changing-the-property-from-http-to-https-in-google-analytics-affect-main-unfiltered-view