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We made transitioned out website to HTTPS. We also now use nearly AJAX to load almost all the content. Therefore all URLs of existing pages have changed. We used 301 redirects as recommended and we have implemented Google's crawlable AJAX specification.

We thought that maybe our rankings be worse for a month and then they would recover. Google's search results are still much worse for us than before these changes. Most of the content (artist profiles) isn't indexed anymore. For example, in the submitted sitemap only 3 of 450 URLs are indexed. Before the changes, almost all URLs were indexed.

Does Google's AJAX crawling and indexing work together with HTTPS? It looks like it should work, because I see Googlebot active in my server logs.

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    Is Google finding the pages when crawling? Check webmaster tools for 404s and any other errors. – Lazlow Sep 22 '11 at 18:35
  • thank you very much.... The log file of the webserver are showing that the google bot is getting the content for the snapshots of the ajax loaded pages which are listed in the sitemap. They are also crawled correctly with the escaped_fragment urls. Any other idea is very much appreciated... – user10552 Sep 29 '11 at 18:09
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    My https only sites are indexed (the public stuff anyway) by Google – user11088 Oct 29 '11 at 19:47
  • It looks like your current site is being indexed pretty well by Google, AJAX and SSL and all. Unless you want to post some kind of "this is what we did to fix it" answer yourself, perhaps this question ought to be closed? – Ilmari Karonen Apr 27 '12 at 22:22
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Search engines generally do not index pages served over SSL or crawl Ajax/JavaScript powered content (the exception being Google's crawlable Ajax standard). So by making this switch you've essentially committed SEO suicide. If you want traffic from the search engines you'll need to allow your content to be found without Ajax (which is just basic accessibility) and without encryption.

Search engines do crawl HTTPS pages and now Google may give additional weight to pages served over HTTPS.

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    Google and all other major search engines will index pages served over SSL! – Josh Nov 3 '11 at 23:52
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    This wasn't true even when it was posted. Now Google have started giving increased rank to sites that serve content over TLS. – Adria Nov 19 '14 at 18:20

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