Website losing rank positions after https

[mszeer]

Hi there.. we were having a good increase in rankings since using Moz and then we purchased an ssl certificate so our website would run under https... to make sure our website is only accessed through https, we have used a method on .htaccess (appache) to make sure the website is only reached through https, using:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R,QSA]

after doing this, from our last crawl perspective, we lost several positions that we were increasing.. what have we done wrong ? we have to fix this asap, please help us...

[cibble03]

Not entirely sure why you would be loosing rankings as https is just a protocol. I have done the same thing after reading the post about google giving slight increase in rankings for adding https. I have not lost any ranks though. I'd keep working as normal and check back in a couple of weeks.

Good luck.

[MoosaHemani]

Ok here is my understanding regarding this and I could be wrong on this so I would love if anyone in the community correct me if I am wrong.

Google usually consider http URLs and https URLs as different URLs so if your website will be working on both http and https the moz tool will give you duplicate content indications.

The reason I believe your rankings are going down is because you have rewrite the URLs but the link value is still on http versions I believe you need to use 301 redirects so that your link values can also shift to https versions.

Again I am not sure about this but this is something that I feel, it should work like this!

Hope this helps!

[Chris661]

Take a look at this thread a few days ago:

http://moz.com/community/q/seo-best-practice-http-to-https

I think Moosa hit it when he mentioned the need for 301s. Also have you set up GWT for your now preferred https site?

[mszeer]

Chris, thanks a lot! the above link helped me a lot !! by the way, what did you mean by "...have you set up GWT..."  ? Didn't understand this part.. thanks a lot!

[Chris661]

GWT = Google Webmaster Tools. In there you can tell Google your preferred website and now you can add the https version as the preferred site. I'm not real clear on the format so hopefully someone will jump in here and MOZ will have more info soon. It is another way to avoid Google seeing the http and https as duplicate content and penalizing you.

Sorry I can't answer more directly!

[mszeer]

I got it... managed to change as you've suggested, let's see next Moz crawl how we will behave... thank you so very much and the others for the help, a nice weekend for all!