Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

Message Too Old, No Replies

Converted to full https, Still some http traffic

         

Broadway

6:40 pm on Nov 8, 2016 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I've taken two websites to full https.
I've gone to Webmaster Console so to compare the traffic of the http vs https forms of both domains.
As expected, the https traffic has grown substantially.
And correspondingly so, the http traffic has die off substantially.
But with neither site has the http traffic gone completely to zero.
Instead a few http pages are reported as occurring.

I'm under the impression that due to .htaccess redirects, my websites are incapable of serving http pages.

What is this traffic?
Is this simply pages in the Google cache and they will get replaced over time?
Is there anything I need to be doing here?

robzilla

10:40 pm on Nov 8, 2016 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Google probably needs a bit more time to process all the redirects. I moved a client's website to HTTPS about 3-4 weeks ago, and some HTTP pages are still in the index, resulting in a few impressions and clicks visible in the Search Console. Have a look at the top queries and see which exact URLs are returned in the SERPs.

Wilburforce

11:47 pm on Nov 8, 2016 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I have also just (6 November) taken my site to full https.

GSC is still reporting no pages indexed, but googlebot has made mutliple visits in the meantime, and the https version is now showing in the SERPs (with a cached version) for all the results I have checked, so clearly GSC's version of reality lags behind whatever is actually happening.

My assumption is that any page that hasn't been crawled yet will still show up as http in the results, and will in all probablility show up in GSC stats as http traffic.

What do your server logs say? I have been checking mine to ensure that .htaccess redirects are all functioning correctly, and so far all http requests have returned a 301. If that is happening in your case I wouldn't worry too much about what GSC says.

not2easy

4:25 am on Nov 9, 2016 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



If http: pages are reported as occurring, you should see what happens when you try to visit those pages yourself via http. Paste the reported URL in a browser rather than navigating to the page, some settings can make a difference. Preferably check the headers, but at least to see if they are or are not being redirected in all cases. It is possible that pages can be accessible at both http and https if everything is not being 301 redirected correctly.

Wilburforce

6:37 am on Nov 9, 2016 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Paste the reported URL in a browser


In some - Firefox, certainly, but you are safest to do it with all of them - you will need to clear history and restart the browser first.

hussainbtk

9:44 am on Nov 9, 2016 (gmt 0)

5+ Year Member



Any pages which still occurring with HTTP they should have not yet crawled by Google bot, try checking your website in Google with site:yourwebsite.com it will show you all the pages which are with or without https.

robzilla

11:27 am on Nov 9, 2016 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



In some - Firefox, certainly, but you are safest to do it with all of them - you will need to clear history and restart the browser first.

Or, in the case of Chrome at least, just go incognito. Opening Developer Tools and making sure Disable Cache (in the Network tab) is checked can also help.