Why HTTPs ruins relationship with advertisers and how to solve it
- SEO |
After switching to HTTPs, I have encountered several problems, of which temporary decrease of traffic from search is not the primary one. Apart from traffic, it is also important for content projects to attract advertisers and to take care of own reputation. In this article I am going to tell how I almost quarreled with good people because of wrong calculations and which things hit the blog's reputation among optimizers.
1. Amount of likes and tweets
Internet users, the ones who actively read thematic articles and communicates on various content platforms, have gotten used to evaluating material's value by amount of likes/tweets/reposts. Especially if the article is old, some information on it has accumulated feedback from users. And if we see that this article has 0 tweets or 0 likes, and the platform is quite popular, then it is going to cause bewilderment at best, and at worst it might negatively affect the reputation of platform.
If you were recommended an article or a webinar by a friend - that is one thing, and you can spend about 10-30 minutes of your time. But if you have randomly stumbled upon it on the internet or saw it in the profile of an unknown person, then you need additional recommendations - should you waste your time on this article? Amount of likes is a good recommendation.
Imagine now that after switching to HTTPs all your likes of old articles are annulled, because URL of page has in fact changed.
Some portals address this issue by completely removing the amount of likes from the view. Not a very good idea since user will have to look for other recommendations of previous readers of article, look through commentaries.
For portals without own sharing statistics problem is not solved. At least until all social networks ignore the protocol when tallying up numeric values.
2. Annulment of Google's ranking
When switching to HTTPs be prepared that Google ranking of your website will drop to zero. Surely in time it will come back - as soon as mirrors are re-glued and next update happens, but for the period of a month of two it is better to remove social network or other visit count buttons from your website, otherwise some webmasters might form a false opinion about this resource. If no attention is paid to correct agglutination of mirrors, then website's zero ranking can remain for a long time and scare away webmasters and some advertisers.
3. Lack of referrer
Browsers are made in a way that if users follow links from secure https-versions of website to unsecure http, then referrer (information, about where exactly did they come from) is by default not transferred. That is why part of statistics got lost when search engines and social networks started using HTTPs.
In blog I practice publication of press-releases. Usually they display good quality, because the information corresponds with the interests of an audience. However, after switching to HTTPs, one of advertisers wrote me that he received a total of 0 visits. Here we have made a decision in time to have a look at statistics of direct-traffic (direct visits) and quickly add utm-marks. Direct visits indeed showed an abrupt leap. That is, all referral traffic went into direct-traffic due to lack of referrer. If we hadn't made a quick decision then it could have ruined reputation of platform for advertiser. There was a same history with banners too, people just didn't see the visits.
If you have a content project and you plan to switch to a secure HTTPs protocol, then I recommend to use UTM-marks for all partner links, and also add meta-tag referrer, which will create rule of work with referrer for most browsers.
HTTPs leads to these consequences. It is kind of supposed to increase reputation of platform, but it decreases it indirectly. On the whole, change of protocol adds a lot of news tasks to checklist, which you might not have planned. You just need to be ready for it. And these problems should scare and stop those on the path to safety. In one of the next articles I will show exactly how HTTPs can positively affect SEO to motivate those who are still procrastinating with decision.
If you have switched to HTTPs long time ago, then share your experience in commentaries. Which unforeseen problems have arisen and how did you solve them?
1. Amount of likes and tweets
Internet users, the ones who actively read thematic articles and communicates on various content platforms, have gotten used to evaluating material's value by amount of likes/tweets/reposts. Especially if the article is old, some information on it has accumulated feedback from users. And if we see that this article has 0 tweets or 0 likes, and the platform is quite popular, then it is going to cause bewilderment at best, and at worst it might negatively affect the reputation of platform.
If you were recommended an article or a webinar by a friend - that is one thing, and you can spend about 10-30 minutes of your time. But if you have randomly stumbled upon it on the internet or saw it in the profile of an unknown person, then you need additional recommendations - should you waste your time on this article? Amount of likes is a good recommendation.
Imagine now that after switching to HTTPs all your likes of old articles are annulled, because URL of page has in fact changed.
Some portals address this issue by completely removing the amount of likes from the view. Not a very good idea since user will have to look for other recommendations of previous readers of article, look through commentaries.
For portals without own sharing statistics problem is not solved. At least until all social networks ignore the protocol when tallying up numeric values.
2. Annulment of Google's ranking
When switching to HTTPs be prepared that Google ranking of your website will drop to zero. Surely in time it will come back - as soon as mirrors are re-glued and next update happens, but for the period of a month of two it is better to remove social network or other visit count buttons from your website, otherwise some webmasters might form a false opinion about this resource. If no attention is paid to correct agglutination of mirrors, then website's zero ranking can remain for a long time and scare away webmasters and some advertisers.
3. Lack of referrer
Browsers are made in a way that if users follow links from secure https-versions of website to unsecure http, then referrer (information, about where exactly did they come from) is by default not transferred. That is why part of statistics got lost when search engines and social networks started using HTTPs.
In blog I practice publication of press-releases. Usually they display good quality, because the information corresponds with the interests of an audience. However, after switching to HTTPs, one of advertisers wrote me that he received a total of 0 visits. Here we have made a decision in time to have a look at statistics of direct-traffic (direct visits) and quickly add utm-marks. Direct visits indeed showed an abrupt leap. That is, all referral traffic went into direct-traffic due to lack of referrer. If we hadn't made a quick decision then it could have ruined reputation of platform for advertiser. There was a same history with banners too, people just didn't see the visits.
If you have a content project and you plan to switch to a secure HTTPs protocol, then I recommend to use UTM-marks for all partner links, and also add meta-tag referrer, which will create rule of work with referrer for most browsers.
HTTPs leads to these consequences. It is kind of supposed to increase reputation of platform, but it decreases it indirectly. On the whole, change of protocol adds a lot of news tasks to checklist, which you might not have planned. You just need to be ready for it. And these problems should scare and stop those on the path to safety. In one of the next articles I will show exactly how HTTPs can positively affect SEO to motivate those who are still procrastinating with decision.
If you have switched to HTTPs long time ago, then share your experience in commentaries. Which unforeseen problems have arisen and how did you solve them?
If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.