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A client has been providing his website with http and https for a few years now and decided to switch to https-only a few months ago. We've started with the usual of changing the internal page links to https first.

However, google webmaster tools / analytics now don't seem to catch the new https-traffic. The tools are loaded correctly, but no clicks are registered. We tried to verify the https as a new property, which did work, but I cannot access the relevant page in the webmaster tools any more.

Also, I find quite different answers on the question if the webmaster tools automatically link http and https-properties to each other or not.

We've now redirected all traffic from http to https and set the main page to https in the google analytics tool. Is that enough to get everything working again? The only thing coming to mind would be deleting the old property completely, but that would obviously delete all attached history as well.

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  • It does not link http and https pages, they are treated as separate entities. Keep in mind that verifying the domain isn't so much for findability as much as it is for auths. Every user must "verify" the domain in order to become an owner and use the tools (or see the domain in the list). So if you were on another account or something and verified, then went to give ownership/auth, you may find the disappearing act you describe. Also keep in mind there is at least a 3 day lag in most cases before data starts to flow into the tools. So keep the new property and the old, try to get auth working.
    – dhaupin
    Jul 28, 2015 at 14:52
  • Ok, I did try to add the https-site to the http-property, but I guess that did not work as intended. Funny enough, the analytics still work as expected. So I'll wait until the new property has all relevant information and then link the analytics page to the new property. Thanks!
    – Lars
    Jul 29, 2015 at 8:20

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We had similar migration and we learned few things while we migrated:

Your question 1 We've now redirected all traffic from http to https and set the main page to https in the google analytics tool

1) Even if you switch your complete site from http to https the changes would not get reflected in a single day. It will take sometime may be a month for complete reflection of results in ranking.

2) So during this period you have to maintain both http and https on webmaster religiously.

3) Google analytics will show both in a single if you have created single property for both http and https.

4) Webmaster treat http and https as different properties. Hence you will get traffic on both for sometime, where http will decline and https will rise sharply.

Your question 2 The only thing coming to mind would be deleting the old property completely, but that would obviously delete all attached history as well.

So due to above stated reasons you should not delete the old property as it would be useful for you to get a insight on crawl pattern and help you identify which all urls are still indexed with http.

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