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I need your help. I am a marketing communications professional who recently re-designed and re-deployed our company website. We are a fairly large player in the employee benefits industry -- playing in a niche where there are about 50 serious competitors. We are also linked to some large insurance companies and one is our parent company. Point being, we should definitely show up on the radar in Google.
My problem:
We have an area of our site for customer data access that needs to be secure. However, our ISS department has put the entire Web site on a secure server. The first page a user hits is the index with essentially this code:
<HEAD>
<META NAME="Redirect" Content="Redirected">
<TITLE>Our Company</TITLE>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0;URL=https://www.our_company.com/our_company/index.html"></HEAD>
After that, everything is HTTPS: The old site was configured the same way and even searching on our very unique company name, the only thing that ever came up in google results was the redirect page. No other pages come up for our company name or any keyword ever. To clarify, the site uses no frames, dirty tricks, etc. just simple HTML with content that is rich and focused.
I read in an old post on this forum that Google does NOT index HTTPS: pages. However, I read in a more recent industry article that google had begun indexing HTTPS: pages. Can anyone clarify?
ALL of our competitors show up in searches on different keywords -- even those with design flaws and poor content are at least several pages back. We've always been nowhere. My assumption is that the HTTPS: is the problem, but before I embark on a mission that will cost us some serious cash and engineering to make the change, I need to be sure. How can I go about doing so?
As an additional note, we just re-deployed the site a week ago with a whole new design and content, but the same HTTPS: redirect. Should I be patient and wait for another crawl? Management wants this addressed ASAP so I am under some pressure.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
TCF
Your problem is not uncommon.
Google started indexing https:// secure sites in around January 2002. To my knowledge - no one else does.
Whilst https:// secure sites can be indexed by Google, they won't actually 'rank' very well for a general search on their content.
You have what I call a 'hammer deployment'. Your IT guys got a new hammer - in your case, a https:// port 443 security device - and they have immediately started to only see nails. Suddenly - everything is a nail - so they get to use their new hammer. Why would you decide to make viewing the 'about us' section of your website a secure port 443 communication?
Other hammer deployments are usually centred around content management systems (suddenly we need to content manage our 3 year old press releases?), and tools like DHTML and flash.
The major issue with all these technologies should be 'responsible' deployment, deployment where the feature is actually required by the business.
So what now?
How do you make your site content which is accessible to search engines? Easy. If the stuff doesn't need to be secure - don't put it behind the Port 443 device.
I don't know where you are located - but you now probably have an inaccessible site. Not all browsers can support port 443 communications (eg Lynx) - the public internet is primarily based on port 80 http. So there could be legal issues which may overshadow all else.
Hope this helps.
Chris_D
Sydney Australia
