Google choosing HTTP URls as canonical than the HTTPS links in the canonical tags after a recent HTTPS migration

Question

I have migrated my blog domain from HTTP to HTTPS. I am running my wordpress blog on AWS Bitnami. I have added necessary canonical on all the posts i.e

<link rel="canonical" href="https://blog.incfo.in/"/>

• Modified all the internal links from http to https

• Wrote Server 301 Redirect Code in /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/conf/httpd- prefix.conf Following is my code:

  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
  RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R=301,L]
  RewriteCond "%{HTTP_HOST}" ^ec2-([0-9]{1,3})-([0-9]{1,3})-([0-9]{1,3})-([0-9] 
  {1,3})\..*\.$
  RewriteRule "^/?(.*)" "%{REQUEST_SCHEME}://%1.%2.%3.%4%5/$1" [L,R=302,NE]
  

Still in my webmaster console in excluded section It is showing Duplicate,

Google chose different canonical than user

How Should I fix this?

Answer 1

It can take Google a full year to index your site on HTTPS after you move over. That was my experience. For full details see my answer to HTTP to HTTPS: Wait for new sitemap to be indexed?

During that first year, Google may still index the HTTP version of some pages saying that they "chose a different canonical than the user." Month by month you will see more and more pages move over to HTTPS in Google Search Console.

This doesn't seem to hurt rankings at all, it just means that some users still get sent to the HTTP version from Google search for a while. Since you are redirecting, they eventually get to the correct HTTPS version.

I was really surprised when I saw that Google was so slow to fully move my sites over to HTTPS. My theories as to why:

• It takes time to build up enough trust in your HTTPS version.
• Each URL needs to go through some sort of verification process where they compare the content on the old URL to the content on the new URL. Since the URLs that are slowest to move over are the least popular URLs with the least PageRank, they may be prioritizing popular pages for the process.