Penalty for changing to https and mobile friendly?

[jetteroheller]

I teached somebody 2009, how to make with my CMS a good site for Google AdSense.
The site had record revenues in the old time from nearly US$ 1000 a month and is now down in the US$ 30 ... 40 range.

I changed my own sites already years ago to mobile friendly and https.
Now I changed also his site on January 22nd to https, mobille friendly, UTF-8

Google Analytics show a constant decline in visitors since January 25th.
Now at 50% less than usual.
Google Analytics shows also the expected change in visitor behavior,
special at mobile and tablet.

The site has 3904 pages defined, so I wonder why site:his_domain.com shows 4270 pages.
It is all with <link rel=canonical HREF= since 2009.

Search console user friendlyness for mobile shows:
2019-11-02 1798 pages red - several problems for mobile
2020-01-18 1463
2020-01-19 1262 after a long steady decline, a jump downwards, 3 days before the big change.
2020-01-25 1142 red 48 green, first time that the change shows up
2020-01-30 87 red 228 green

Any interpretation what is happening?

[Pjman]

You most likely have some sort of problem on the way googlebot is seeing your site. Or your changed your URLs as a result of the change.

My company has converted over 2200 of our sites to https, those were the only times we saw drops in traffic. Once reverted back, everything returned to normal.

[tangor]

@jetteroheller ... If all redirects are properly in place you simply must allow enough time for g to catch up. They move fast ONLY ON THEIR END, your side, not so much.

Ten days is not enough time to know what is going on ... ten weeks or ten months is more like it.

This is one of those "tough it out, things will get better, eventually" kind of things.

[lammert]

Look in the access logs for the http version of the site if visitors are properly redirected in one step to the https version of the same URL. If there is not a direct 301 redirect from the old to the new site, your site may be suffering both rankings and visitor loss for visitors coming through direct links.

Also, https takes more time to serve because of the handshakes involved before the site is served. This may cause the site to slow down to lose some visitors who can't bother to wait before it is loaded. But it shouldn't cause a 50% decline.

Also carefully check if the site is loading external resources (scripts, images, etc) which are still accessed through a http link. Some browsers may refuse these resources or issue a warning message, causing visitors to abandon the site because they might think it is unsafe.

[not2easy]

Look in the access logs for the http version of the site if visitors are properly redirected in one step to the https version of the same URL.

I very much agree with this, it makes spotting problems easier. If there is more than one way to access the content, it should be using a canonical 301 rewrite whenever possible to consolidate versions of content. The "new" site listed in GSC should be showing an increase that corresponds to the "old" site's decrease.

[jetteroheller]

The http to https redirect makes the provider by his settings.
Just checked the log from yesterday:
6241 status 200 requests
2160 status 301 requests

All internal links are local with "../", external is only Google AdSense and Google Analytics.

Search console user friendlyness for mobile shows now 70 red 246 green, a very slow change

[lammert]

That is three times more 200 status codes than 301. You should get 100% 301 redirects because you want all http requests to be forwarded to the https equivalent. Something is not functioning correctly there it seems.

[jetteroheller]

No, there should be no 301 redirect, because all the search engines should send direct to the https version.

At checking the log, I discovered many ERROR 500, because a Perl Script to take visitor data without cookie was not set executealbe, now corrected.

[lammert]

Search engines are just one source of visitors to the site I hope. There should also be visitors through links from other sites, social media and direct type-in traffic. All that traffic is http traffic and should be redirected with a 301 redirect to the equivalent https URL. Search engines know you and rank you because of other sites linking in. All those incoming links are http and if you do not redirect them properly with a 301 redirect the link juice will effectively die causing the rankings to tank.

And finally, don't expect some magic happening in search engines which makes them capable (or willing) to recrawl and reindex a 3904 pages site in a period of less than a week. It may take months before the last URL is fetched and properly re-indexed.

[not2easy]

If you can visit the http: version of the site and find content then yes, there should be a 301. Same thing for with/without www. Without a 301 to ensure that one version of your domain is accessed there are now 4 versions of the same content rather than the 2 versions available before changing to https.

These URLs are all showing the same content and Google sees them as 4 different "sites". The meta canonical tag is seen as a suggestion or preference and it can take far longer to have search engines understand the changes.
http://example.com
http://www.example.com
https://example.com
https://www.example.com

A 301 ensures that only the version that you prefer to have indexed can be visited and that requests for those other versions are shown the "new" site. Yes, it will take more than a week but you can speed it up with a 301.