On Bing Webmaster Tools, how do I move a site from http to https without losing webmaster data?

Question

I'm being asked to move the site to https from http under Bing Webmaster Tools. The site has been https for a long time with 301 redirects already in place.

In Google, we have both URLs but in Bing Webmaster tools, it shows the http version.

I read about the "Move Tool", and I'm unsure if it will work for this purpose. Bing Support hasn't replied after almost a week.

I've read articles that say I have to remove the site and add it again, but won't that cause me to lose any data that Bing Webmaster Tools has on the site?

What other adverse effects could that have? Is this even worth it?

Answer 1

Don't delete your site from Bing Webmaster Tools altogether. You will lose historic data, and besides this is too drastic an action for an http -> https move.

If your 301 redirects are already in place, as you say, hold off on using the Site Move Tool. In the Bing documentation for this tool, it says, "permanently redirecting your URLs using 301 redirects is sufficient for Bing to understand that you want the new URLs to be indexed instead of the old ones and this normally happens automatically." Also, none of their use cases address a move from non-secure to secure URL's, so I doubt they see this as a major move (like a total TLD switch).

Here are the steps you can take, in this order:

1. Ensure your 301's are applied to every page and resource on your website.
2. Do a search for your domain in Bing (such as site:example.com). Are the URL's in the index mostly secure? This will give you an idea of any progress the crawlers made, and if you have pages that don't redirect that you need to fix.
3. Update your XML sitemap with secure URL's only; no non-secure URL's should be in the sitemap. Then, submit the updated sitemap via Bing Webmaster Tools, and wait for a re-crawl and updated indexing.
4. If the above fails for some reason, add the secure version of your site to Bing Webmaster Tools. Get that indexed. If the http version still hasn't fallen out of the index, you can use the Site Move tool, as a last resort.

Validation of the above steps can be found in this discussion.