Huge Search Traffic Drop After Switching to HTTPS - No Recovery After Couple of Months

[etakgoz]

Hi

In November, we have switched our website (https://www.insidermonkey.com) from HTTP to HTTPS. Initially, we noticed slight search traffic loss but later discovered it might be due to HTTPS switch. A month later we added the https version at search console, and then saw an immediate huge drop (about 25-30%).

We discovered the problem might be due to poor redirection and noticed our redirects were 302s instead of 301s. To fix the problem, we implemented the 301 redirects and submitted the sitemap containing links to the old site at the new search console property (https). We've gone through points listed on the page below:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543

• We fixed the redirects to 301
• Double-checked the sitemaps
• Made sure we had a properly installed SSL certificate (Now, we get A+ from https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.insidermonkey.com)
• Made sure we have no mixed-content errors (we don't have any issues at search console.)

We only avoided implementing HSTS, in case we might want to switch back to HTTP.
We had a small improvement in the following month, but our traffic did not fully recover. We wanted to test for the possibility to switch back HTTP by switching only 2 articles in our CMS to HTTP. Our traffic got worse, not only for those but for the whole site. Then we switched back those 2 articles to HTTPS again and implemented HSTS.

It seems our search traffic getting worse day by day with no sign of improving.

In the link below you can find the screenshot of our weekly search traffic between 1 October - 1 March. We are down from 500K weekly visitors to mere 167K last week.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Y1TQbj_YtGG4NhLORbEWbvITUkGKUa0G

Any ideas or suggestions? We are willing to get professional help as well. What is the way to find a proper consultant for such problem with relevant experience?

[NgEF]

Hi etakgoz,

That's a huge drop. I've actually seen a similar drop in traffic before in the past, specifically due to a site redirection issue and also Google Penguin penalties. What caused a mis-diagnosis for me in the past was that our site redirection happened at almost the same time as Google core algorithm changes during the same period.

Have you taken a look at the algorithm change timelines to see if it's possibly an external factor that caused the drop in traffic?

Other than that, did you have any tracking tools or software similar to Moz that you were using to keep track of site issues or the backlink profile? The decrease in traffic is pretty severe and there could be a multitude of issues possibly causing this. Was there a similar decrease in search rankings along the same period of time as well?

Sorry for the questions, but it'll really help if you could provide more details for further diagnosis.