We recently changed protocol to HTTPS and our google search impressions has plummeted. The old site, with the URL beginning with HTTP is still appearing in google search results even though we have set up our redirects correctly.
Do we go ahead and request URL Removal in Google Webmaster Tools or leave google to do its thing. We are worried that Google might be seeing our old site and penalising our new site for duplicate content.
No. If you do that the http version will be removed too. Ensure you have set up 301 redirects and be patient.
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This is either a problem that Google is inflicting upon me, or a problem I am inflicting upon myself. I'm not totally sure.
When I first created my website a couple years ago, it followed a path similar to: http://www.mywebsite.abc123.com
Now, after a change in hosting services, I changed my domain to simply: https://www.mywebsite.com
I also added an SSL certifcate at the time for what it's worth. And it's been almost six months. I have all the variations (past and present) of my website registered and verified with Google's search console, but I can see no reason why the http://www.mywebsite.abc123.com link is getting indexed over the https://www.mywebsite.com link. I actually just assumed that http://www.mywebsite.abc123.com wouldn't even work anymore.
I've read about 301 redirects and it looks like something like that would solve my problem, but upon trying to implement it, I was confronted with nothing but a "Too many redirects" error.
Long story short, Google won't index my newer better URL.
But Yahoo and Bing will.
301 redirects have to be set up in the old domain so that it will point to the new one. If you still have access to that domain, you can add the redirects via .htaccess or in the admin panel.
My newly relocated (and slimmed down) site provides links with index.html (rather than the folder name followed simply by \) where they are required.
Google Analytics has not picked up on this and still reports 403 and 404 errors, which no longer apply.
Do I have to anything else or should I just wait for Google Analytics to refresh? If so, how long would this typically take?
I should mention that I have checked the site with a dead links checker and all seems OK.
Google Analytics doesn't crawl your site and will never pickup on that. Older reports will contain the older urls forever.
Newer reports will show the new urls as you start to track them.
I'm having some issues with Google Analytics URL parameters. Prviously I've built URLs with the Google Analytics URL Builder. these have enabled me to track where visitors to my site have been coming from, how successful various marketing campaigns have been etc.
Recently, I've started using another tag in the URL, one which has nothing to do with Google Analytics, but acts to alter the telephone number on my site when the visitor arrives on it. For example, I'll add &ctcc=adwords onto the end of my tracking URL, and a specified phone number will appear on my site when the user comes through so I can track how many calls my adwords spend has generated.
However, when I've been using this ctcc code, Google Analytics no longer seems to be tracking the traffic numbers to my site :(
Any idea how I can incorporate the two parameters into the URl, and ensure that they both work as expected?
Thanks in advance
It looks like this is a problem with how your server is redirecting traffic with a ctcc query parameter. Look at the following request and its response headers:
So the ctcc parameter is used in some server side tracking (as best as I can tell), and the server is set up to redirect & strip ctcc whenever it gets a request with ctcc. Not being familiar with the system in use, I can't provide details, but you need to reconfigure the redirects to stop changing & into ;. It's the replacement of ampersands with semicolons that is messing up your GA data.
When I attempt to load an embedded video onto my page, using the following:
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/BzC135ql_wA?version=3&enablejsapi=1"></embed>
the request is automatically redirected from HTTP to HTTPS- as a result the API is inaccessible, because of browser security limitations.
This appears to be related to my Google account, as it doesn't redirect if I try from an incognito window. However, this worries me- some users of my site won't be able to use the page as I intended, and as far as I can see I will have no way of knowing.
Is there any way to force HTTP, or anything else I can do here, short of hosting my own site on HTTPS?
There are a number of browser extensions that automatically translate http:// URLs into https:// for a specific set of domains. I'd imagine that you're using one such extension, which would explain why you don't see that behavior in an Incognito window. I can't tell you which extension you might be using—I know that HTTPS Everywhere is popular on Firefox, but not sure which are commonly used on Chrome—but take a look at chrome://extensions/ for any likely culprits.
I have a little problem with google bot, I have a server working on windows server 2009, the system called Workcube and it works on coldfusion, there is an error reporter built-in, thus i recieve every message of error, especially it concerned with google bot, that trying to go to a false link, which doesn't exist! the links looks like this:
http://www.bilgiteknolojileri.net/index.cfm?fuseaction=objects2.view_product_list&product_catid=282&HIERARCHY=215.005&brand_id=hoyrrolmwdgldah
http://www.bilgiteknolojileri.net/index.cfm?fuseaction=objects2.view_product_list&product_catid=145&HIERARCHY=200.003&brand_id=hoyrrolmwdgldah
http://www.bilgiteknolojileri.net/index.cfm?fuseaction=objects2.view_product_list&product_catid=123&HIERARCHY=110.006&brand_id=xxblpflyevlitojg
http://www.bilgiteknolojileri.net/index.cfm?fuseaction=objects2.view_product_list&product_catid=1&HIERARCHY=100&brand_id=xxblpflyevlitojg
of course with definition like brand_id=hoyrrolmwdgldah or brand_id=xxblpflyevlitojg is false, i don't have any idea what can be the problem?! need advice! thank you all for help! ;)
You might want to verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools which will provide URLs that it finds that error out.
Your logs are also valid, but you need to verify that it really is Googlebot hitting your site and not someone spoofing their User Agent.
Here are instructions to do just that: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/09/how-to-verify-googlebot.html
Essentially you need to do a reverse DNS lookup and then a forward DNS lookup after you receive the host from the reverse lookup.
Once you've verified it's the real Googlebot you can start troubleshooting. You see Googlebot won't request URLs that it hasn't naturally seen before, meaning Googlebot shouldn't be making direct object reference requests. I suspect it's a rogue bot with a User Agent of Googlebot, but if it's not you might want to look through your site to see if you're accidentally linking to those pages.
Unfortunately you posted the full URLs, so even if you clean up your site, Googelbot will see the links from Stack Overflow and continue to crawl them because it'll be in their crawl queue.
I'd suggest 301 redirecting these URLs to someplace that make sense to your users. Otherwise I would 404 or 410 these pages so Google know to remove these pages from their index.
In addition, if these are pages you don't want indexed, I would suggest adding the path to your robots.txt file so Googlebot can't continue to request more of these pages.
Unfortunately there's no real good way of telling Googlebot to never ever crawl these URLs again. You can always go into Google Webmaster Tools and request the URLs to be removed from their index which may stop Googlebot from crawling them again, but that doesn't guarantee it.