Does SSL version constitute duplicate content?

[samwest]

I fat fingered a migration of an html site to WP and had a popular SEO plugin set for "force SSL", so my sitemap went out as all SSL. This morning I see G picked it up already, but for some strange reason, the link G gives results to a page without a working SSL link. If I copy the URL and paste it into the address bar, it works fine as SSL, but G's links don't.

So, I set the SEO / sitemap plugin back to just http: which fixed the sitemap and I did a resubmit...

Question: Are serious repercussions to be expected? All I can do now is wait.

[samwest]

Just saw RC's post on Google giving a bump to sites with SSL. Always had it, but we have forms and logins that use SSL. Just don't see a need to force SSL on everything, cause eventually a bad plugin will mess it all up. For now I'm back to http://www.example.com as the preferred URL. Using SSL only on forms and login pages.
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 12:21 am (utc) on Aug 9, 2014]
[edit reason] changed example domain to example.com [/edit]

[Robert Charlton]

samwest - I'm not exactly following what you're describing, but it does sound like you temporarily disconnected yourself from Google.

An SSL/https version would be either duplicate content, or a "new" site with the same content but with different urls... depending on whether you now can see the site on just one set of urls, or on both https and http.

I'm not sure from your post and question whether you understand that when changing an http site to https, you would have to 301 redirect all of your urls from http to https for Google properly handle the change.

You only want one protocol to resolve for each individual page. Both protocols returning a 200 OK header response is dupe content, and https/http dupes can be a mess to clean up.

You would need to use mod_rewrite to fix the situation. Once links to both protocols get out there in the wild, it's my experience that full canonicalization is the only way to fix this. That's something you should have had in place from the start, but very possibly might not have.

I don't mean to fill you with dread here, as I'm not really sure what happened. You should check your header responses for all your pages, on both http and https.

This might explain why you're not seeing traffic, as mentioned in this months Updates and SERPS thread.... but again, I'm not getting a clear enough picture from your description to say.

In Google's official announcement, referenced in the HTTPS thread [webmasterworld.com...] ...note that there is a link to a series of Google Support articles on how to move your site properly....

Move a site with URL changes
Make sure Google can index and serve your content under your new URLs
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033049 [support.google.com]

[samwest]

Robert: yes, you are correct about the disconnection. Yes, there is more to the story though and I did expect some drastic effects from what I've done.,,

My html site was 14 years old, consisted of 70 pages and that's it. Rather than continuing on with html (and slowly dying listings)and expression web, I decided to move my wordpress blog into the root and replace the entire site using that CMS. I planned this quite carefully for over a year and slowly added pages as private, then last week, I deployed the whole replacement site making all posts and pages public, complete with the seventy 301 redirects and a permalink plugin to catch any stragglers.

My only fly in the ointment was that yoast seo was set to "force https:" but when I typed [mysite.com...] it worked fine, but the Google cached version would pull up the site as if no CSS existed. Clicking a refresh or pasting the displayed URL worked OK too, it's just that the Google cached link didn't work...which is odd.

I tried a couple of SSL plug-ins that attempt to fix any loose SSL elements, but that didn't work for the Google link either. So I wound up here to see if SSL is preferred. I have always used it on my signup forms, logins etc. - or what might happen if I quickly switch back to [....] I did go ahead and set yoast to "use default" which is http:// - then resubmitted the site map.

After three days, I see the new blog pages are now started to be digested and indexed. The new site has 196 pages and posts and at first, G only had indexed 2, the 14 the next day, then 32, yesterday 46 and this morning 106 are indexed, so that's good!


The 301 redirects are working and when I type my domain name alone, I get a nice listing with site links and they all test out as 200 response.

I think this is a pretty fast recovery for a complete migration. The only thing I am seeing that is bad it my search queries are dropping like a rock. From 4,000 to 1,000 in the same number of days since I migrated. That too should return. I know the algo is very busy right now (according to Algoroo). Guess all I can do is sit back and let the magic happen.

wish me luck and thanks for any advice you can offer. Cheers!

[Robert Charlton]

wish me luck and thanks for any advice you can offer.

samwest, good luck. ;)

but the Google cached version would pull up the site as if no CSS existed.

Several quick comments. The Google cache is not necessarily in sync with the Google index. The cache generally comes from a different data center than the one that serves up the serps, and it's not unusual for it to be behind the index. In times of change, as we're having now, a refreshed cache might even revert to an older one and then come back.

[EditorialGuy]

I wonder how soon Google Webmaster Tools will let you choose between "http:" and "https:" in Site Settings, as it does with www.example.com and example.com now?

[chewy]

Sam - can you pls report on how things are going a few months later?

Hope you got your traffic back, and then some!