Http urls on a new https website

[MVIreland]

Hi,

If a site is quite new and setup as https from the beginning why would http variations exist?

There are 301 redirects in place from the http to the https variation and also canonical tags pointing back to the http variation? This seems contradictory to me.

I'm not sure why the http variations exist at all but they have gone to the trouble of redirecting these to the https variation indicating that it is the variation of choice but at the same time using a canonical tag that indicates the http variation is the original/main url?

Thanks

[LoganRay]

Hi,

It's difficult to tell without seeing the site, but the likely problem is related to those canonical tags. A canonical tag that doesn't point to the preferred version of a URL can cause indexation problems, but not resolving URL issues.

There could also be some pages that don't have that 301 redirect applied, therefore leaving some pages to resolve at HTTP.

[MattRoney]

Hi M V,

Any updates on this, or are you able to share the site? How's it going?

[PinpointDesigns]

As Logan pointed out, the most likely cause of this is because of the canonical tags pointing to the HTTP variation. I'd probably suggest carrying out the following:

Download a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider and crawl your full website - https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider - Once the crawl has run, export the data and check both the URLs and the Canonicals across all pages to ensure only HTTPS variants appear.

If you find http variants, then it's likely that the redirect rules you have in place aren't working. This is a global rewrite rule that can be applied to force the https:// version to show at all times, so you shouldn't need to make the changes once by one. I'd also make sure that if you're linking to any pages internally, that you're linking to them using a relative path, or straight to the https:// version. If your canonicals are causing issues, just ensure they're always choosing the HTTPS version and you shouldn't have any issues!

Finally, in GSC, just make sure you've got the HTTPS version of the site setup and that your sitemap includes only HTTPS URLs.

Hope this helps!