Impact of migrating whole site from HTTP to HTTPS

Question

We migrated our website to HTTPS everywhere and we have setup a 301 redirect on all the pages when the protocol is HTTP. However, one of the SEO experts who is helping us with all things SEO sent us the following email:

Currently I have found a workaround where I'm using https as the base URL as 301 redirect to https has removed all http pages from Google index which means I'm starting from scratch as far as indexing is concerned, because of this redirection and removal of all http pages from Google index, traffic numbers are affected and I'm working hard to restore them.

Is this true? Does Google lose all the indexed pages from HTTP when HTTP is migrated to HTTPS using a 301 redirect?

Answer 1

If the proper steps are followed, Google should replace the HTTP indexed URLs with the HTTPS ones over time, during which you may experience a dip in your rankings.

The steps to follow are outlined here: Google Webmaster Tools - Moving your site. Expanding on those:

• Use 301 redirects
• Update internal and external links
• Update the URLs in your sitemap
• Update any canonical URLs
• Make sure you don't have any server or robots.txt exclusion rules preventing the new URLs from being accessed
• Use the Fetch as Google tool to trigger crawling your site
• Check for crawl errors, and Sitemap Details page to view how many URLs in your sitemap were crawled and indexed

Without knowing which of these steps were followed, it's difficult to say if something went wrong or was missed. However, you might discuss these with your SEO consultant.