http vs. https

These might be considered as different urls and you should implement the 301 redirections from http to https to preserve the rankings/indices.

SSL is for secured pages, you've basically told Google your whole site is a secured site, like an ecommerce checkout page (private data).

Why do you need SSL on the whole site?

Hi Slap,

Yes since you changed your links from http to https- Google is now considering your links (https format) as new links. This explains why your traffic has dropped.

And yes the resolution to this it to apply 301 redirect but you may also temporarily experience a drop in your rankings.

Another option is to apply canonical to your http and https pages. This will accomplish the same thing as 301, only that both pages will appear in search.

....exactly what I thought guys. Thanks for confirming! I personally didn't do this, I was brought onto a project where I worked on this site years ago, got them 1st page rankings....they restated to a new skin....then pushed the SSL to every page. Yukon....your question is mine as well....

I do not see the old http pages in the cache/index....thus leading me to believe that the old pages were taken down....replaced with the new https....and now they are starting from scratch with rankings.

Thanks gents.....

Slap

Just to make it clear

http://example.com/somepage

and

https://example.com/somepage

can serve up completely different content as they are effectively completely different URLs.

Although, there are a lot of websites where http and https mirror each other, apart from some transaction pages.

Dumb question, but do you have a valid certificate?

A lot of sites are going to all https, not just ecommerce.
Twitter, FB, etc. even google.

Thing is, there is no reason for a normal everyday site to do it.

You should have done a 301 redirect for everything, and, make sure
your server is now faster and have a good data plan. Not an issue
yet, as you are getting no traffic.

Anyone worth their salt would have started slowly, made sure it was
google-friendly and transferring, before going whole hog.

Paul

Paul and others have a good point here...

You either revert to your old site and regain your ranking. If it doesn't rank you should build some top notch backlinks..

Or do a redirect and still backlink if it doesn't come up after a couple of weeks..

This 'could work' but not sure though as I have not really tried this yet: If you have the old sitemap (the one you had for http), then you can resubmit that AFTER you applied the 301 redirect. Google can still re-index your old links if you submit the sitemap to them.

Hi,
I am newbie in the SEO field. I have a little bit of knowledge about SEO. All my friends are saying that both are different URLs in the eye of Google. It might be.
But I knew that both are same in the eye of Google. Thanks.

I'd like to butt in here..

There is a perfectly valid reason to have the whole site https if at some point the user will be taken to a https page (CC, checkout, whatever).

Basically when a user goes from http -> https all link/url attributes are stripped which means that all your tracking is lost. So if you are tracking your sources diligently or using tagged links to drive traffic from different sources you want to ensure that you understand the user flow throughout the whole website without any breakages.

If there is a http -> https jump then your source will no longer be attributed to that user and will be regarded either as a Referral (from your own domain mydomain.com) or it will be recorded as 'Direct' traffic. Useless data.

There is nothing worse than spending all the time and efforts to track, only to have 2 conversion sources, Referral and Direct.. which tells you nothing about what is actually working. Therefore having a site fully https is legitimate for some webmasters.

I do it because I want to track everything and I do have an SSL for internal pages so it makes sense to https the lot.

So before jumping back on the http bandwagon find out whether there is a https element of your site thats important for your user flow and traffic tracking.

But definitely sort out the 301 redirects.. thats why your traffic dropped.. not the https.

https is the secure connect. it benefits in convey secure consumption by visitor.Http Is the non-secure connection that not encrypted

What you should do, even if it's been a long time, is 301 redirect the http:// URLs to the https:// version of the same URL. It's just one or two lines in your .htaccess file to do that.

https does not mean "this is an ecommerce site" or anything other than "the connection to this site will be encrypted". Many of the sites you use every day are HTTPS-by-default, including Google, Facebook, Gmail, Wikipedia (if you have an account), Internet Archive. HTTP version 2.0's current draft will have the entire web encrypted by default outside of intranets.

I moved Improvely from http:// to https:// months ago to improve organic traffic tracking accuracy. No search listings or ranks changed at all, Google just updated the links when it saw the 301 redirects. Search traffic never went down.