http > https sitemap weirdness, how to interpret them?

Joe 10

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Around the 4-5th January I moved a site from http to https.
301s are in place, new property added, the redirects are working.

I was expecting the http pages to be de-indexed and not even crawled anymore but look:
https://pasteboard.co/IRWVmRT.png

After I moved to https the number of "indexed, not submitted to sitemap" has gone higher for the http version and http pages are still crawled and indexed.

Since the http version is redirecting to https, shouldn't this graph go lower and slowly to zero?

I would have expected a decreasing and not an increasing.

Index Coverage report: The graphs would reflect the site move, showing a drop in indexed URL counts on the old site and an increase of indexing on the new site. Check regularly for any unexpected crawl errors.


Could someone please suggest what this could be, and how I could fix it?

Thank you
J.
 
Last edited:
After I moved to https the number of "indexed, not submitted to sitemap" has gone higher for the http version and http pages are still crawled and indexed.

Since the http version is redirecting to https, shouldn't this graph go lower and slowly to zero?
J.

That actually makes sense because all of the htt p links were already indexed. So now the crawler revisits those links and finds them redirected to the http s version but not in the sitemap. So the graph will go up until it has revisited all of those old links. Once a link has been indexed it will keep crawling it, no matter if it is changed by a 301 or removed by a 404.

If you have properly 301 redirected to the http s version and setup the property in Analytics/Console you don't have to worry about it. All of your traffic and stats should be redirected and be visible in the h ttps property.

Hope this helps
 
But this is what google says:

Index Coverage report: The graphs would reflect the site move, showing a drop in indexed URL counts on the old site and an increase of indexing on the new site. Check regularly for any unexpected crawl errors.


I should see a drop in indexed URL on the old site http and an increase on the https.
 
Hmm weird. Are you sure that you have created a new property for the http s version and 301 redirected it trough either your Cpanel or manually in your htaccess file? (If you type in the http version in your browser, does it redirect to the http s version?)

And have you setup the force redirect to either the www and non-www correctly?
 
Yes I did it in .htaccess,
and both http wwwhttp and wwwhttps redirect to nonwww https
 
It looks like you have set everything correctly. If you have added the h ttps property in Console, submitted the new sitemap with h ttps links and 301 redirected the h ttp / wwwhttp / wwwhttps to h ttps, it should eventually pick up all the new links.

The old site links are still in the index so when it crawls the site it notices that they are not in the sitemap anymore which is reflected in the graph. It should drop overtime.

If you can see your new URL's being indexed on the h ttps property with no errors and all the stats are visible I wouldn't worry too much about it.
 
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