To those who lost ranking with HTTPS - was your site listed in DMOZ?

[glitterball]

Really this is a question to those webmasters who have an old site that previously had a link in the old Open Directory (DMOZ).
Did your site lose ranking after the switch to https?

I'm wondering if Google could have maintained the data from DMOZ as a kind of whitelist, and that any benefit from being on that list was lost once a site was moved to https.

It's a long shot, but it might explain why we don't seem to have found any common factors that explain why some sites suffer after the move and others do not.

[robzilla]

I find it highly unlikely that Google would use DMOZ for any purpose whatsoever, considering how outdated and unreliable the data would be. These are the days of AI, and I'd be surprised if "whitelists" or "seed lists" were still being used at all. Also, most sites would've been HTTP back then.

[glitterball]

Also, most sites would've been HTTP back then.

That's exactly my point.

[Robert Charlton]

Also, most sites would've been HTTP back then.

That's exactly my point.

301 redirects should take care of the HTTP >> HTTPS situation in all applicable areas. Way back, I've applied domain redirects for changes of domain names listed in DMOZ (http to http, but changing domain names), and 301s worked with no problems.

I've also seen with my very own eyes that 301 protocol redirects work seamlessly (http to https, and vice versa). So, even if Google had kept a white-list, (IMO both improbable and pointless*), redirects would have handled the protocol changes.

*Why would a white-list for this kind of situation be both improbable and pointless?... As SEOs came to understand what made good backlinks, it gradually became clear that there was nothing special per se about either .edu domains or DMOZ listings. Chances are because of their provenance that they were more likely to be good quality sites with clean backlinks, and they were editorially selected for the directory, but in fact there was nothing otherwise special about them that gave them an inherent advantage over good sites that you could find that weren't .edu and weren't in ODP. In other words, there wasn't a separate "trust" factor that got added to them.

[No5needinput]

As SEOs came to understand what made for good links, it gradually became clear that there was nothing special per se about either .edu domains or DMOZ listings.

Except for the Page Rank factor - When it actually meant something :-)

[Robert Charlton]

Except for the Page Rank factor

My point was that none of those factors was unique to DMOZ or .edu, or for that matter .gov. They may have been easier to find there, but PR was not unique to those environments. It worked the same way everywhere on the web. It did take a while for everybody to figure that out.

[not2easy]

301 redirects should take care of the HTTP >> HTTPS situation in all applicable areas. Way back, I've applied domain redirects for changes of domain names listed in DMOZ (http to http, but changing domain names), and 301s worked with no problems.

I've also seen with my very own eyes that 301 protocol redirects work seamlessly (http to https, and vice versa). So, even if Google had kept a white-list, (IMO both improbable and pointless*), redirects would have handled the protocol changes.

True, and I suspect there are those who believe they have done all that without understanding that there are some complicated factors that can adversely affect the performance of "301 redirects".

The placement of them has an optimal position in an .htaccess file.

There are those using CP to handle redirects which is seldom the best way to do them (and might not be doing what you thought).

There are others who have mixed usage of RewriteRules (mod_rewrite) and Redirect or RedirectMatch commands (mod_alias) without realizing what happens to those lines when the server parses them.

There are many sites with URL paths affecting redirects (believing that folders and subfolders are covered by a root rewrite).

Until all of those possibilities have been triple checked and tested, until all versions of the domain in GSC are in agreement, there is a possibility that damage or loss of position is self-inflicted.

[glitterball]

Everyone seems to be missing my point.
There is no DMOZ anymore, so a 301 redirect is not going to redirect a link that does not exist!

However, I think most people will agree that DMOZ was very important once-upon-a-time, so perhaps Google used the (open) data from DMOZ and, to prevent a sudden massive change to rankings when DMOZ closed, kept that data in one form or another after DMOZ disappeared?

Google's algorithms have often been more about what pages they DO NOT return in the results, rather than those that they do - so DMOZ would have been very useful since there were very few spammy sites in that list.
So while it was true that the sites listed in DMOZ were not all special, it was also true that a DMOZ listing was a very good indicator that the site was not spam.

[aristotle]

I've noticed that some sites are using 302 redirects [instead of 301s] for the redirect from http to https. But many of the owners of these sites may not be aware of this, because they didn't create the redirects themselves in an .htaccess file, but instead used the hosting company or maybe content management software to create them.

Anyway, since 302s imply that the redirects are temporary, it's possible that they are having a negative effect somehow.