No redirect or canonical to HTTPS homepage from HTTP version

10 replies
  • SEO
  • |
Hi Everyone,

Last week we've migrated our site from http to https. Since then our rankings disappeared and traffic drop by 90%.

Now we are using SEMRush to scan our site and received the following notice,

No redirect or canonical to HTTPS homepage from HTTP version

which seems to be the main issue. However, our site is indeed already on https, but it seems Google cannot tell that we have moved.

Can you give us suggestion on how to inform our developer to fix this issue? Thank you.
#canonical #homepage #http #https #redirect #version
  • Profile picture of the author Aaden Taylor
    If you turn your website from HTTP to HTTPS then you have apply redirect method like 301 or apply canonical tags to web pages for maintain traffic from Search Engine.
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    • Profile picture of the author jay168888
      Thanks for your reply Aaden,
      The issue is that we do see

      <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.ourwebsite.com/" />

      on our homepage

      but somehow SEMrush is still showing that the site is not 301 redirect or canonical
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  • When you have converted the website from HTTP to HTTPS, Proper redirection (301) should be made for every internal link and the Ahref ie., content links. After redirection, I suggest you to check your website using Screaming frog tool.

    Also, place the canonical tag by choosing the exact domain of your website and place above the </head> tag.

    Finally, In the webmaster (Google Search Console) set the prefered domain of your site.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jozef Majda
    What is a good plugin for wordpress for canonical tag ?
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  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    The canonical tags are not going to fix your rankings.

    You need to add the proper coding in your .htaccess file to make sure that each HTTP url is redirected to the corresponding HTTPS url.
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  • Profile picture of the author etdigital1
    If your website Moving on HTTPS to HTTP then you have to use redirection techniques or use the canonical tag on your website. hope your problem solved
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    • Profile picture of the author yukon
      Banned
      Originally Posted by etdigital1 View Post

      If your website Moving on HTTPS to HTTP then you have to use redirection techniques or use the canonical tag on your website. hope your problem solved
      Wrong.

      A canonical tag is in the HTML source code.

      Like I said earlier, Google looks at the http/https header first, that's where Google finds the 301 redirect.

      Here's the flow Google follows, in this order:
      1. Google follows link/URL
      2. Google looks at the URLs http/https header (301)
      3. Google looks at the webpage HTML source code (canonical)

      A canonical tag is a recommendation, an option. A 301 redirect flat out tells Google, the URL/page has moved, update your data.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    SEMrush is not Google.

    What you should have done is verified the redirect was setup correctly by viewing the http/https header.

    That will show you eaxactly what is happening when Google bot follows your URL. Google looks at the http/https header before they even look at the HTML source code of your webpage.

    You should see a 301 redirect in your http/https header code.
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  • Profile picture of the author SEO-Dave
    Here's a simple test for you.

    When you load the http version of the site does it automatically redirect to the https version?

    If it doesn't you didn't complete the full migration from http to https.

    If it does redirect to the https version test it's a 301 redirect with a header checker like http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php

    You should see results like this if the 301 redirects are in place:

    Code:
    HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently =>
    Date => Thu, 22 Mar 2018 03:05:34 GMT
    Server => Apache/2.2.15
    Location => https://seo-gold.com/
    Cache-Control => max-age=86400
    Expires => Fri, 23 Mar 2018 03:05:34 GMT
    Vary => Accept-Encoding
    Content-Length => 229
    Connection => close
    Content-Type => text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
    You are looking for "301 Moved Permanently" when testing the http version.

    Assuming your site is on an Apache server add something like this to your .htaccess file at the top:

    Code:
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^seo-gold.com$
    RewriteRule (.*) https://seo-gold.com/$1 [R=301,L]
    That's taken verbatim from one of my sites, replaces the domain name with yours. The above assumes your site loads with the non www version, not the www version.

    David
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  • Profile picture of the author Chiedo
    If you have a WordPress site, skip your developer, save money and use something like this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-force-ssl/

    If you don't have a WordPress site, just tell your developer to redirect all http requests to the https version. That should be a pretty basic request for any developer to understand and correct.
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