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After switch to https, traffic isn't showing in Analytics says:

Google Webmaster Tools treats HTTP and HTTPS as different properties. Hence you will get traffic on both for sometime, where HTTP will decline and HTTPS will rise sharply.

Our HTTP interface on GSC still shows a good amount of traffic. We migrated sometime in late 2017. Is this normal? How can this be addressed?

The image shows the data for the last three months for HTTP version of the homepage.

3 Answers 3

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In my experience Google will still index some HTTP URLs months or years after moving to HTTPS.

I answered this question and included graphs from my Google Search Console that shows Google indexing HTTP pages months after I moved the site to HTTPS. I no longer have the HTTP property listed in GSC, so I don't know if Google is still indexing a few HTTP pages, but it wouldn't surprise me.

There is nothing that I know of that you can do about it. Neither canonical tags, nor redirects are 100% effective at getting Google to index the HTTPS URL. Google will hang on to a few less popular HTTP URLs for a long time after moving to HTTPS, even if you implement redirects properly.

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Can you see where the http clicks are coming from? Is there a chance that either a lot of site users have the http address bookmarked, or that your client's site is being linked to from sites that posted the link before the site changed over to https? Either of these could account for those clicks.

If you want all traffic to go to the https site, you can set up a dns redirect from http to https. How you would do that depends on where the site is hosted - different hosts have different processes for changing dns info.

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  • The http version is already redirected to the https site...So i am unable to figure out how the http version of the homepage is receiving clicks at all...
    – chicgirl
    Mar 6, 2019 at 16:25
  • You said that you have redirected HTTP to HTTPS, but how is that implemented? Because you can use a meta tag in one page to redirect to another page, so if your redirect is done this way, then both the HTTP and HTTPS pages will be hit each time. It's always better to do redirects in configuration on the web server. Usually this involves setting up two web sites on your web server, one which is your "main" site, it contains the content, and is accessible via HTTPS only, and another one which is a "redirect" site and contains no content, only a permanent redirect to the main site. Mar 7, 2019 at 2:06
  • @BrettDonald I checked with the tech and they said the redirects are done on the server like you mentioned.
    – chicgirl
    Mar 7, 2019 at 10:52
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If the redirection is done at Server Level its fine.

But you can make use of Google Search Operator - site:domainname.com -inurl:https to find HTTP URLs appearing in Google SERP. Sometimes when you click those URLs they may redirect to HTTPS. This may be also one of the reason for showing clicks to HTTP in Google Search Console.

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