Here are the most frequently asked questions:
Q: Should I switch my site completely to HTTPS, or gradually?
Google recommends initially moving only part of the site to test the possible effects on traffic and search indexing. The rest of the site can then be moved completely or in parts.
When choosing which part of the site to test, choose a section that changes less frequently and is not significantly affected by frequent or unpredictable events.
Also keep in mind that moving just one section is a great way to test this move, it's not necessarily representative of moving an entire site when it comes to search. The more pages you move, the more likely there will be additional problems to resolve.
Careful planning can minimize problems.
Q: How long should I take the test?
Gary Illyes says you should plan for a couple of weeks to allow crawling and indexing to notice the changes, plus time to monitor traffic.
Q: Although we are starting with a portion, we plan to make the entire site available over HTTPS. To prevent indexing of early HTTPS content, should we use canonical redirects or rel=?
With redirects, you will not be able to test those pages from a technical point of view. For that reason, Google recommends using rel = canonical.
Q: We reference HTTP sitemaps in the robots.txt file. Do we need to update the robots.txt file to include our new HTTPS sitemaps?
Google recommends separate robots.txt files for HTTP and HTTPS pointing to separate files for HTTP and HTTPS. They also recommend including a specific URL in a single sitemap file.
Q: Which sitemap should I assign to the HTTPS test section?
You can create a separate sitemap just for the updated section of your site. This will allow you to track test section indexing more accurately. Make sure you don't duplicate these URLs on any other sitemap.
There is nothing else you need to add to robots.txt for the HTTPS version.
Q: HTTPS site redirects to non-migrated HTTP pages. What should I list in the sitemap? Should we list the HTTP and HTTPS protocols in our sitemaps? What happens if in the test section the HTTP addresses are redirected to HTTPS?
List all HTTP URLs in your HTTP sitemap, and all HTTPS URLs in your HTTPS sitemap, regardless of any redirects when the user visits the page. Having pages listed in the sitemap regardless of redirects will help search engines discover new URLs faster.
Q: If we set includeSubDomains in our HSTS header, what domains will that affect?
After migrating your entire site to HTTPS, you can preload HSTS for added security. To allow this, you must configure the includeSubDomains directive in the HSTS header.
If the site www.example.com has an HSTS header with includeSubDomains set, then it will apply to www.example.com and foo.www.example.com, but not to example.com or foo.example.com.
Keep in mind however that HSTS adds complexity to your pullback strategy. Google's recommendation is the following:
Use HTTPS without HSTS first.
Starts sending HSTS headers with a short maximum expiration Monitors traffic from both users and other clients, as well as performance-dependent traffic such as ads.
Little by little the maximum HSTS age increases.
If HSTS does not negatively affect your users and search engines, you can, if you wish, request that your site be added to Chrome's HSTS preload list.
Q: Use a single Google News sitemap for our entire site. What do we do if we are migrating our site part by part?
If you want to use a Google News sitemap for the new HTTPS section, you will need to contact the News team to let them know about the protocol change, and then in your HTTPS property in Search Console you can submit a new Google News sitemap for each migrated HTTPS section of the site.
Q: Are there specific recommendations for Google News Publisher Center with HTTPS migration?
The Google News Publisher Center handles HTTP->HTTPS moves transparently. In general, you don't have to do anything from a Google News perspective, unless you're also using news sitemaps. In that case, please contact the News team and let them know about the change.
You can also let the team know about changing sections, for example, in case you are moving to HTTPS, you can specify that you are moving to http://example.com/section https://example. com/section.
Web migration from HTTP to HTTPS can give your website a small ranking boost. There are many more factors that influence the position of your pages in Google search results.
