- Dec 30, 2007
- 3,113
- 1,764
Most of you guys know this already, it's common knowledge sort of, but some of you do not. I am pretty sure of that. So I just thought to mention this and hopefully some you will find good use of it as I'm positive that this had effect on stabilizing rankings of some of my sites in G and much more effects, but that's just me blabbing around so I'll drop that points out. This is my opinion on this matter. That's clear, but let's just say that I'm not claiming anything just sharing thoughts and facts from my personal experience.
For start, we all know that www version of a site and non-www version of a site are pretty much two different versions of a site. We can even name www version of a site to be actually a subdomain of a site (with duplicate content as non-www), but let's not get into much details about that.
So, in the past year or so everyone was crazy about moving to https and shit. This fact had effect on SEO for sure, not as a ranking signal, but on a way for website that moved from http to https to lose back linking power tad a bit (sort of like doing 301).
At one point when cPanel (that like 90% of hosting companies use) upgraded, what it did, it enabled SSL for ALL accounts on that server and provided cPanel certificate for 30 days or so and each and every site since that point was responsive to https version. We are talking about tens of thousands of websites. I do know as well that G checks up on your site like site.com/m or m.site.com and such usual ways to see if it responds and if there is mobile version of site, so by that being said (and how that relates to https) is that google being google it simply tested if there is https version of a site and started indexing https version of sites that should not have been indexed or even asked to be indexed as sites started responding to https.
Just to make clear. None of the sites that I'm mentioning here do not need https at all. They have no user input, not even asking for an email from a user. They just have no need for https protocol.
I have seen a drop of traffic on one of my sites and I've checked up on that and I was quite surprised, half of site was indexed like http and half like https. What? Why? Who? WTF?! So, I have decided to clear up on that and I've realized what happened.
I've done split testing then, this entire story that I'm talking about took like 6+ months for sure of me testing out, I've done some my websites and forced them to use https and some to http just to avoid duplicate content and to see what will happen. Somehow, the ones that I've forced back to http got back where they have been, well not quite, but let's sort of say they did. The other ones, they stayed with lower visitor count and never came back. Of course, all links pointed were to http.
TL;DR
So, my point here is, after all of this above. Remember, there is not one version of your site, you actually have 4 versions of a site that you might not be aware of. They are:
Few more notes, all those google updates, stress, chaos, PBN is dead, SEO is dead bla bla... Yeah, it's getting slightly different, but IMO it has A LOT to do with simple recalculating of these 4 versions of sites (at least 2 https/http) that some of the website owners are not even aware of.
Yeah, tad a bit of confusing read, I know. I hope it'll reach out to at least few of you.
For start, we all know that www version of a site and non-www version of a site are pretty much two different versions of a site. We can even name www version of a site to be actually a subdomain of a site (with duplicate content as non-www), but let's not get into much details about that.
So, in the past year or so everyone was crazy about moving to https and shit. This fact had effect on SEO for sure, not as a ranking signal, but on a way for website that moved from http to https to lose back linking power tad a bit (sort of like doing 301).
At one point when cPanel (that like 90% of hosting companies use) upgraded, what it did, it enabled SSL for ALL accounts on that server and provided cPanel certificate for 30 days or so and each and every site since that point was responsive to https version. We are talking about tens of thousands of websites. I do know as well that G checks up on your site like site.com/m or m.site.com and such usual ways to see if it responds and if there is mobile version of site, so by that being said (and how that relates to https) is that google being google it simply tested if there is https version of a site and started indexing https version of sites that should not have been indexed or even asked to be indexed as sites started responding to https.
Just to make clear. None of the sites that I'm mentioning here do not need https at all. They have no user input, not even asking for an email from a user. They just have no need for https protocol.
I have seen a drop of traffic on one of my sites and I've checked up on that and I was quite surprised, half of site was indexed like http and half like https. What? Why? Who? WTF?! So, I have decided to clear up on that and I've realized what happened.
I've done split testing then, this entire story that I'm talking about took like 6+ months for sure of me testing out, I've done some my websites and forced them to use https and some to http just to avoid duplicate content and to see what will happen. Somehow, the ones that I've forced back to http got back where they have been, well not quite, but let's sort of say they did. The other ones, they stayed with lower visitor count and never came back. Of course, all links pointed were to http.
TL;DR
So, my point here is, after all of this above. Remember, there is not one version of your site, you actually have 4 versions of a site that you might not be aware of. They are:
- https://www
- https://
- http:/www
- http://
Few more notes, all those google updates, stress, chaos, PBN is dead, SEO is dead bla bla... Yeah, it's getting slightly different, but IMO it has A LOT to do with simple recalculating of these 4 versions of sites (at least 2 https/http) that some of the website owners are not even aware of.
Yeah, tad a bit of confusing read, I know. I hope it'll reach out to at least few of you.
