Google’s John Mueller answered a question about moving to HTTPS, explaining why the process of making a site secure is actually a major undertaking that can have a negative impact on rankings.
Loss Of Top 3 Google Rankings
A person asked on Reddit why they lost their top 3 rankings in Google after making their site secure with HTTPS. They also replaced their old WordPress theme and updated their content.
They explained their situation and asked for advice:
“We have a 15 year old financial website hosted with godaddy deluxe plan, suddenly disappeared in google after moving https. We replaced our wordpress old theme and updated new content. Our old http site scored top 3 in google. We implemented 301 using real simple ssl few days ago so far rankings not recovered. Some of the http links still not crawled and updated by google.
Do you think going back to http would recover our rankings? We feel all is lost. Any chance of recovery.”
HTTPS Migration
There are multiple things that stand out as possible reasons for losing their rankings. But John Mueller focused exclusively on the HTTPS migration as the likely reason for losing their rankings.
Mueller responded:
“Moving to HTTPS is a bit like a site migration, all the URLs have to be recognized, recrawled, and reprocessed individually. So especially if this move was made a few days ago, you need to give it time to recover (in particular, don’t use the URL removal tool to try to get rid of the HTTP URLs, since it will also remove/hide the HTTPS URLs). (I won’t touch upon finally moving to HTTPS after so many years, but I guess I just did :))”
All Is Not Lost
I have had several occasions to test how fast Google could return an entire website back to former rankings and have been pleasantly surprised at how fast Google is able to process a major website change or recover from being offline for as long as a month.
The person is rightfully having a freakout about losing their rankings, but it’s only been a few days. Mueller said to give it some time, and based on my own experiences, I would agree.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Anton Vierietin
