Leason Learned: Impressive drop by protocol switch

[SirLouen]

1 month ago, I started noticing that one of my sites start rapidly declining

I have a big friend/client that has two big sites linking from his nav bar to my site

For some reason, he asked me to do some changes in his sites and at some point of mid-march I was inspecting with screaming frog some links and found that the links he had in the nav bar were pointing to my NON-HTTPS version of my site: something like:

<a href ="http://www.mysite.com" >

But my site was some time ago, switched to https so for some bizarre reason I thought:
"If Google is using that a href to my old non-https link it will be doing two jumps => http => 301 => https, so now that I have the opportunity I'm going to switch from http to https to make things easier for Google"

Don't ask me how I got to that reasoning, but in the last while I'm a little bit absurdly obsessed with removing all type of 301...

So I decided to change the link in the TWO sites to

<a href ="https://www.mysite.com" >

And this is what happened:

I'm just writing this as something to be aware of. In fact, I don't know what to do now, if it will be a good idea, to switch back again, or if it will be better to leave things "as is", and wait to see if the big G decides to take this links as worthy again.

But essentially my lesson learned is that 301 are not that bad as I thought.

 

[mzonas]

I switched one of my blogs to https, there was decline in ranking but then it stabilised. I really see no reason why you would want to do https unless you deal with sensitive information such as accounts and card details (like ecommerce sites).

My guess is that Google will recrawl that link (which now links to the https version right?) and it will be back to normal. However, Google is being slow these days ...

 

[Tishina]

I've observed this when updating content - somethes it looks it has a positive effect, other times the page plummets back 3-4 positions or it can even drop 1 or 2 pages behind.

 

[Kiwi94]

I switched one of my blogs to https, there was decline in ranking but then it stabilised. I really see no reason why you would want to do https unless you deal with sensitive information such as accounts and card details (like ecommerce sites).

A few reasons:

1. It looks very unprofessional to have a "Not Secure" label in address bar.
2. Looking unprofessional will decrease conversions.
3. HTTP/2 will speed up your site. Good for SEO and conversions.
4. It's a Google ranking signal: https://www.bluecorona.com/blog/https-and-seo