Massive drop in visitors after switching to https

7 years ago

Forget SearchMetrics.

Did you see an actual drop in website traffic?

Of course SearchMetrics will show a drop. It will be awhile until they find all the new URLs. SearchMetrics though has nothing to do with your actual traffic or rankings. It is just an estimate.

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schaer76

7 years ago

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

Forget SearchMetrics.

Did you see an actual drop in website traffic?

Of course SearchMetrics will show a drop. It will be awhile until they find all the new URLs. SearchMetrics though has nothing to do with your actual traffic or rankings. It is just an estimate.

Hi , Yes, we have a 35% decline compared to the previous period.

2016-06-25_1111 - eurolights1's library

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ScooterDaMan

7 years ago

The hubub surrounding moving a site to all HTPPS is overblown and, in most cases, completely unnecessary. Just because Google announces something as one of 200 ranking factors does not mean that you need to change your whole structure to accommodate them. If it is a factor at all (Google has been known to lie), it is certainly not one that seems to make much of a positive difference.

Based upon both mine and a major eCommerce course that I am affiliated with's limited experimentation with this, our preliminary tests show that any website with backlinks is going to see a drop because those links are now having to go through 301 re-directs to a new URL. You are going to lose about a third of a link's value for at least several months when it is being re-directed to another URL. Even with sites that had no backlinks, we saw zero evidence that moving it to all HTTPS did anything to help rankings and, in fact, seemed to hurt the rankings (perhaps because internal links were being re-directed).

For sure, eCommerce sites need to have their ordering pages as HTTPS. The whole website? Hardly! I'd strongly advise against moving a site to all HTTPS unless you have a very good reason for doing so (i.e. you are collecting sensitive data from people on every page).

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schaer76

7 years ago

Originally Posted by ScooterDaMan

The hubub surrounding moving a site to all HTPPS is overblown and, in most cases, completely unnecessary. Just because Google announces something as one of 200 ranking factors does not mean that you need to change your whole structure to accommodate them. If it is a factor at all (Google has been known to lie), it is certainly not one that seems to make much of a positive difference.

Based upon both mine and a major eCommerce course that I am affiliated with's limited experimentation with this, our preliminary tests show that any website with backlinks is going to see a drop because those links are now having to go through 301 re-directs to a new URL. You are going to lose about a third of a link's value for at least several months when it is being re-directed to another URL. Even with sites that had no backlinks, we saw zero evidence that moving it to all HTTPS did anything to help rankings and, in fact, seemed to hurt the rankings (perhaps because internal links were being re-directed).

For sure, eCommerce sites need to have their ordering pages as HTTPS. The whole website? Hardly! I'd strongly advise against moving a site to all HTTPS unless you have a very good reason for doing so (i.e. you are collecting sensitive data from people on every page).

Thank you for your reply. I am now noticing the issue but there is nothing i can do at this point rather than make the best out of it. Unfortunately, there is no way back. Anyway, i dont believe that the switch to ssl is the only issue. There has to be a different issue that causes the drop.

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DABK

7 years ago

The issue is that your links no longer point at your pages. There doesn't have to be anything else; that's plenty enough.

Originally Posted by schaer76

Thank you for your reply. I am now noticing the issue but there is nothing i can do at this point rather than make the best out of it. Unfortunately, there is no way back. Anyway, i dont believe that the switch to ssl is the only issue. There has to be a different issue that causes the drop.

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schaer76 7 years ago

Originally Posted by DABK

The issue is that your links no longer point at your pages. There doesn't have to be anything else; that's plenty enough.

Thanks, Do you think it is advisable to switch back to the old store (different url structure) after being with the new site for 2.5 months ?

We are really looking at all options.
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MikeFriedman

7 years ago

For all of your links that you control, you should change them to point directly to the new URLs. Don't let them redirect through the 301. Contact webmasters on other sites where you have links and get as many of them changed as you can.

Also, and this is one where most people screw up, make sure all of your internal links are updated to the new URLs and not going through the redirect.

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patco

7 years ago

It should be OK after a few days/ weeks. According to me, you shouldn't worry about this!

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schaer76 7 years ago

Originally Posted by patco

It should be OK after a few days/ weeks. According to me, you shouldn't worry about this!

Thank you for trying to calm me. However, we already switched our site 2.5 months ago and its not going in the right direction. Visitirs are not at 30% decline too. I am really thinking of swithcing back to our old site. However, i have no idea if this is a good idea or if this even hurts our site even more. https://www.semrush.com/info/interior-deluxe.com
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Mike Anthony

7 years ago

Personally I wouldn't do any of the main suggestions in this thread until I went over the rank history for various keywords. i'd want to know precisely the serps most being affected. hopefully you have been tracking keyword ranks etc.

If you have that data at one of the links you gave forgive me but all I saw was a general visibility chart not broken down by actual keywords.

the thing is you made two changes at once - Https and a cart. Magento is decent with SEO but also has some plugins and tweaks you can make it better with (its fresh in my mind because we wrote an article on magento SEO a couple months back). Almost always a change like that (depending on what you are coming from) makes various changes that by themselves can affect SEO).

This does give me some pause.

"- changed shopping cart to magento - url format has changed - we have redirected all urls"

What does that mean? As I think one other poster mentioned you don't want to get too redirect crazy that you don't manually change your internal navigation and just do redirects.

I knew of one company that we had to stop in their tracks because thats what they wanted to do.

But again the number one thing I would do if you ave any historical rank tracking information is pinpoint where the most visibility is being lost. In many situations having that points directly to the problem and the links or on page changes affected. I agree with you - I doubt its just the https.

I would not tell everyone to change their links pointing at the site or switch back and forth until I knew where the lost was taking place in terms of keywords

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ScooterDaMan 7 years ago

Great advice, Mike. Knowing where the big losses are occurring is certainly going to give a lot of clues.

Personally, I have a hunch that a fair amount of this problem is Magento. As you stated, there are a few SEO issues with that cart and it is certainly appreciably slower than other shopping cart solutions out of the box. And, of course, all of those re-directs, which I previously mentioned could be having a major affect - especially with any pages that were linked to internally and/or externally.
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paulgl

7 years ago

Somewhere, here in the forum, I did a long post on https.

People were falling all over it, calling it the next best thing because google upchucked something about it.

I warned people to have a complete version in http. Some people can't make a secure connection each and every time, especially noted on smartphones.

If you have images or other elements only in https, they may not load in http. People may get a warning and surf away. This is especially frustrating, as I found out, when redoing a church website. Macs for some reason had a problem as well getting pdfs, even though they were getting a secured connection and all was available as such. I had to literally change links on all pages just to make sure.

Any good server that you switch or create from scratch with, should actually create the whole site under both. After that, however, it could be up to you to do a link that works on both. Images were not loading either in the above case.

That iffy secure connection can be a pain in the a$$.
(If you have a sat dish, you probably know you can't get HD all the time)
Servers and connections vomit all the time, slamming the door on an uninformed visitor.

That is only one problem.

The main other problem would be page speed. The page speed could suffer. So anyone who claims nonsense about page speed, then touts https, is more than all wet. It could be a contradiction in the real world. Your https could slow your site way down.

If you do not need people to login, no apparent reason for https. But people fall on this because google burped something mundane about it.

Now that's only 2. There are several other problems with switching to https.

Paul

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schaer76

7 years ago

Originally Posted by paulgl

Somewhere, here in the forum, I did a long post on https.

People were falling all over it, calling it the next best thing because google upchucked something about it.

I warned people to have a complete version in http. Some people can't make a secure connection each and every time, especially noted on smartphones.

If you have images or other elements only in https, they may not load in http. People may get a warning and surf away. This is especially frustrating, as I found out, when redoing a church website. Macs for some reason had a problem as well getting pdfs, even though they were getting a secured connection and all was available as such. I had to literally change links on all pages just to make sure.

Any good server that you switch or create from scratch with, should actually create the whole site under both. After that, however, it could be up to you to do a link that works on both. Images were not loading either in the above case.

That iffy secure connection can be a pain in the a$$.
(If you have a sat dish, you probably know you can't get HD all the time)
Servers and connections vomit all the time, slamming the door on an uninformed visitor.

That is only one problem.

The main other problem would be page speed. The page speed could suffer. So anyone who claims nonsense about page speed, then touts https, is more than all wet. It could be a contradiction in the real world. Your https could slow your site way down.

If you do not need people to login, no apparent reason for https. But people fall on this because google burped something mundane about it.

Now that's only 2. There are several other problems with switching to https.

Paul

Thank you! Thats why i still think we should switch back to http. Regarding the redirects - our WMT has lots of crawling errors - 2016-06-27_0010 - eurolights1's library

Thats why we are running a script that is generating a 301 redirect for each of these 404 pages. These 404 pages are url's from our old shopping cart that are still in google index.

Really not sure what to do next

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Mike Anthony

7 years ago

Originally Posted by schaer76

Thank you! Thats why i still think we should switch back to http. Regarding the redirects - our WMT has lots of crawling errors - 2016-06-27_0010 - eurolights1's library

Thats why we are running a script that is generating a 301 redirect for each of these 404 pages. These 404 pages are url's from our old shopping cart that are still in google index.

Really not sure what to do next

After 3 months if the architecture of the new site was correct you should be seeing that number falling sharply week after week WITHOUT a script. When we are talking about crawl errors we are not just talking about dilution of incoming link value being diminished but googlebot not being able to find the pages at all or being very slow to update the pages that do exist.

If you do switch back it won't be an instant fix because the pages Google did index will then show errors. At any rate doing mass redirects to solve every 404 for every error is not the way to go. depending on the script you could have real broken links internally and they would be masked by the script.

Its odd that neither your SEO or coder did not foresee this issue but its clear to me this is NOT just a https issue. Again a history of ranking pages would be very helpful in determining how to handle it. Those pages could be manually fixed and if needed those incoming link sites be approached better. Even if you are switching back knowing that would help to regain traffic faster.

At any rate I lean toward you switching back at this point only because you need to get up to speed as to how to handle this. Very important though - you should be checking to see if the numbers are falling ( but the script will be masking that result so that might be pointless). If you have a SEO that helped with this and didn't foresee these issues he/she needs to answer for himself. As it is whoever switched the site over should have foreseen the issue as well.

P.S. if you have been running that script for a while it doesn't seem to be doing its job anyway.

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schaer76

7 years ago

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

After 3 months if the architecture of the new site was correct you should be seeing that number falling sharply week after week WITHOUT a script. When we are talking about crawl errors we are not just talking about dilution of incoming link value being diminished but googlebot not being able to find the pages at all or being very slow to update the pages that do exist.

If you do switch back it won't be an instant fix because the pages Google did index will then show errors. At any rate doing mass redirects to solve every 404 for every error is not the way to go. depending on the script you could have real broken links internally and they would be masked by the script.

Its odd that neither your SEO or coder did not foresee this issue but its clear to me this is NOT just a https issue. Again a history of ranking pages would be very helpful in determining how to handle it. Those pages could be manually fixed and if needed those incoming link sites be approached better. Even if you are switching back knowing that would help to regain traffic faster.

At any rate I lean toward you switching back at this point only because you need to get up to speed as to how to handle this. Very important though - you should be checking to see if the numbers are falling ( but the script will be masking that result so that might be pointless). If you have a SEO that helped with this and didn't foresee these issues he/she needs to answer for himself. As it is whoever switched the site over should have foreseen the issue as well.

P.S. if you have been running that script for a while it doesn't seem to be doing its job anyway.

Hi Anthony, We have been using the SEO setup of mageworx, a well respected module maker for magento. Obviously, they havent seen these issues coming.

You state that mass redirects in order to solve all 404 errors is not the way to go, well what is it then ?

You state if our architecture were correct, we should be seen these numbers falling week after week . However, its now looking like this and the number only began to fall when we put the script in place. Should i have been waiting longer ? 2016-06-27_1016 - eurolights1's library

I have done a comparison of the old search analytics file in WMT of our http version and our new https version.

The sites who lost the most traffic after the switch are below

https://www.interior-deluxe.com/dini...-lighting.html
https://www.interior-deluxe.com/rest...-lighting.html
https://www.interior-deluxe.com/pendant-lights.html
https://www.interior-deluxe.com/

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Mike Anthony

7 years ago

Originally Posted by schaer76

Hi Anthony, We have been using the SEO setup of mageworx, a well respected module maker for magento. Obviously, they havent seen these issues coming.

Sorry If you guys did both the change and SEO yourself and my comments offended you. That was not my intention. A lot of the times companies farm out one if not both SEO and coding related services so I stated what I did if that was the case and you could hold the person responsible.If that wasn't the case thats cool.

Mageworx if I recall is somewhat of a plugin. It can't really foresee all issues related to changing from every cart out there.

You state that mass redirects in order to solve all 404 errors is not the way to go, well what is it then ?

well some 404s could be broken links. You don't want to merely redirect those you want to fix the links. Products like screaming frog should give you more detail and where the fix can be done manually its better . Put it this way. If you are losing juice from incoming links due to a redirect because of https as some are saying (frankly 33% loss someone else mentioned seems high to me but I can't vouch nor totally deny some else's experience) then think what would be happening redirecting all those pages indiscriminantly? I'd want to make sure the pages are crawlable to key pages (eg category pages, pages that have ranked etc) without redirects. Those I'd want to fix manually. Googlebot should be able to get to them easily with no redirect. If after you have all those done I realize it can be impossible or take too long to fix everything but then Magento normally does ok with navigation.

Really the only thing that should be throwing 404s from the https change should be incoming links but from that number I see if I am reading it right the internal crawl is throwing a ton load as well

You state if our architecture were correct, we should be seen these numbers falling week after week . However, its now looking like this and the number only began to fall when we put the script in place.

Well the script is going to mask the issues. What I was really referring to (probably poorly) was the pages in the index that are from the old site. yes over time those would fall out of the index naturally

Should i have been waiting longer ? 2016-06-27_1016 - eurolights1's library

Well thats what concerned me.. From the chart the day that you started to see a fall was coming up on three weeks ago and you have only fallen from around 48,000 error to just short of 40,000. So if the script is what caused it to fall its been in place for nearly three weeks and you STILL are showing nearly 40,000 errors. Heres what I'd do. I always like to have major issues confirmed by at least two tools. I'd set a crawler to start out at the home page with the existing https site and see the errors that pop up. This separates it totally in the mind of whats happening inside the site and whats happening with whats indexed at Google in search results. Something like screaming spider

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

Will give you a whole lot of data about other issues (any site with ton loads of product pages should have something similar as a broken link or other issue results in lost sales).

if you find a high number of 404s in that second tool also just crawling your Https site then you have internal navigational issues totally unrelated to incoming links (the crawler would only be dealing with internal links )

https://www.interior-deluxe.com/dini...-lighting.html
https://www.interior-deluxe.com/rest...-lighting.html
https://www.interior-deluxe.com/pendant-lights.html
https://www.interior-deluxe.com/

Great. I'd want to do two things with a list like that

A) make sure internally the pages can be reached without a redirect
B) see what keywords I was ranking for those pages in the past as compared to now.

If they are about the same or just a few positions off then you might want to renew link building to move back up. If its way off the old rankings then you are close to deciding to switch back. If you do that along with running a crawler and get huge errors confirmed then its more of a no brainer to go back to the old site and try just securing the actual purchase areas instead.

Incidentally did you do the Https change and Magento install the exact same day?

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yukon

Banned 7 years ago

It looks like OP is collecting sensitive data, at least physical address, phone, email, name, etc... so my advice is stick with the https.

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dilek101

7 years ago

These things you need to check , your apache config , your magento .htaccess , and your magento settings , sometimes even if you set it to ssl it will go to http:// , so to force this you must go to system / configration / web/ and set https to unsecure link aswel.