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I was checking Google Search Console and noticed that there is massive drop in Google impressions since July, not sure what could be the reason.

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I remember that I integrated a cookiebot.com script for GDPR compliance, and I'm not sure if that had done anything to it. On the other hand, I cross checked website traffic which seems to be fine as I don't see any drop in traffic, it is just the Google impressions which has dropped suddenly.

I am not a geek in this fields and don't know where to start digging for this drop. Does blocking cookies have anything to do with it? I find it hard to relate as there is no drop in traffic.

One important thing I would like to mention is that we moved from HTTP to HTTPS. Could that be the reason, and how can this be fixed?

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  • when moving from http to https you will see http drop and https rise until all the 301 and 410 are integrated into https (google webmaster tools treats each protocol as different sites) Commented Aug 26, 2018 at 23:18
  • @alo do i have to do something for integration or this will be automated by google itself
    – Learning
    Commented Aug 27, 2018 at 4:20

2 Answers 2

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The Google Search Console site you are looking at is specific to http.

You need to also verify your new https site with the Google Search Console to see how it is performing.

That drop for http is standard when you move to https. You should see the other property shows a sudden increase.

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When moving from http to https you will see http drop and https rise until all the 301 and 410 are integrated into https (google webmaster tools treats each protocol as different sites)

As how to proceed, in my experience you just add the https version as a new property, set up the redirects in your server: use 302 (found) until you are sure the urls are right then change to 301 (moved permanently).

Replace all javascript and css calls to be protocol agnostic:

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>

becomes

<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>

Fine tune the redirection rules to avoid multiple redirections (for a couple months you will have one extra) ie:

from http to https and then to https with www.

for http://yourdomain.com it could be two redirects :

  • http to https <- first redirect
  • https without www. to https://www.yourdomain.com <- second redirect

that could be just one redirect tweaking the rules:

  • http with and without www. send them to https://www.yourdomain.com <- one redirect
  • https without www. send them to https://www.yourdomain.com <- one redirect

To "speed up" the transition and cleanup the index it's advisable to submit a sitemap and if it's not already there add it to the end of robots.txt too something like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /demos/

Sitemap: https://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml

Once sitemap is processed and robots.txt checked do a fetch as google

Depending on your domain as google sees it, this transition time could last between 1 and 5 weeks, and after 4 to 6 months all should be normal again in the https property (http will still get residual hits)

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