Does anyone know if an increase in 804 HTTPS errors will affect SEO rankings?

[SimonWorsfold]

We recently moved our whole site over from HTTP to HTTPS and we went from having 106 keywords in the top 3 positions to 80 in just one week. The only thing that I can think of that caused the drop is the HTTPS changes to our site. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Jennifer

Take a look at the questions and answers here as this has been discussed and referenced a resource I would have posted.

http://moz.com/community/q/804-https-ssl-error

If crawlers see issues with your servers and protocol, that could potentially be a negative checkmark against your site in the SERPS. I would discuss with your web dev and SEO team how to properly implement changes to fix these issues.

Hope this helps! Good luck.

[DirkC]

Hi Jennifer,

Migration to https has certain risks (like any other migration of your site). Without the actual url it's difficult to asses what's wrong with the site.

1. You can check here if the SSL was properly implemented: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

2. There is an interesting article on the technical migration on the site of Yoast (https://yoast.com/move-website-https-ssl/) - and about the potential SEO impacts here: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl - even if you have already migrated you could check the different steps & check if you have skipped one.

3. Try crawling the site with Screaming Frog - it has a tab Protocol that can show you if all pages are on https or if some are missing. You can also check if all your internal links are updated to the https version.

4. I guess you have created a WMT for https version of your site - check if specific errors are listed.

5. Check pagespeed with google page speed analyser & webpagetest.org - check your scores. It possible that adding the https also made your site slower.

6. Sample pages in different browsers - do you get security warnings when visiting pages. These messages can really frighten your visitors, and have impact on stats like bounce rate & avg. visit duration, and as result have an impact on your rankings

7. Check vital stats in Analytics - like bounce rate, pages/visit, avg visit duration, avg time on page... - did you see major changes after migration. Also check if you see an increase in 404 pages.

Hope this helps in solving your problem,

Dirk

[SimonWorsfold]

This is very helpful. Thank you Dirk.

Just for clarification our site is https://www.tsheets.com

[DirkC]

Jennifer,

Some of your pages still reference http images - example https://www.tsheets.com/proadvisors-we-trust.php calls image http://cdn.tsheets.com/images/pros/denise-loter-koch.png

"Your connection to www.tsheets.com is encrypted with obsolete cryptography. However, this page includes other resources which are not secure. These resources can be viewed by others while in transit, and can be modified by an attacker to change the look of the page."

This is probably the reason for the 804 errors in Moz.

You should also check your internal links - some of them still point to the http version which is then again redirected to the https version

Example https://www.tsheets.com/infographics/time-tracking-infographic-hr-industry links to http://www.tsheets.com/infographics/time-tracking-infographic which is then redirected to https.

Unrelated to the https - but you might want to optimise the image on https://www.tsheets.com/online-invoicing-and-billing/ (https://www.tsheets.com/online-invoicing-and-billing/images/main-image-billing.png)

rgds

Dirk