XenForo On HTTPS -> Did it affect Google Rankings?

[Ridemonkey]

It began going down in a day or two after we made the switch. It was surprising for us; and I personally expected it to go down over a period of 1-2 weeks and then recover in about 3-4 months as Google indexed everything again.

Right... what I mean is, you said you had a huge traffic loss of 50%. What I mean is, did that traffic bleed out, losing 50% over 6 months, or a year, or two years? Or did you lose most of it within, say, a few weeks?

 

[TheBigK]

Right... what I mean is, you said you had a huge traffic loss of 50%. What I mean is, did that traffic bleed out, losing 50% over 6 months, or a year, or two years? Or did you lose most of it within, say, a few weeks?

We lost it over 2 - 5 days of time, and it continued at that level for some time for about 8 to 9 months. We were stuck by another issue through 404 errors on our site which dropped our traffic down to 40% of the new traffic.

Google indexed our site pretty fast back then, crawling about 40 - 90 k pages / day.

 

[rdn]

We lost it over 2 - 5 days of time, and it continued at that level for some time for about 8 to 9 months. We were stuck by another issue through 404 errors on our site which dropped our traffic down to 40% of the new traffic.

Did you mean by loss, loss in terms of Page Views or Impression?
Not Unique visitors?
Is yes then that's normal because XenForo works with ajax/overlay most of the time so it will not be counted.

Is SPDY easy to install and run with Xenforo?

With Nginx, yes very easy.

How is your experience with SPDY? Any downsides?

No downside but advantages
More faster website
More info: https://thethemefoundry.com/blog/why-we-dont-use-a-cdn-spdy-ssl/

Are there any special considerations we need to make before we decide on switching (with respect to add ons / structure etc.)?

Check all your ads if they support https, change embed resources like image, css, js from http:// to // like:
//xenforo.com/community/data/avatars/m/1/1319.jpg

So that it works both http and https request.

 

[Ridemonkey]

Did you mean by loss, loss in terms of Page Views or Impression?
Not Unique visitors?
Is yes then that's normal because XenForo works with ajax/overlay most of the time so it will not be counted.

50% is not normal, though.

Our unique visitors are slightly up after the transition, but our pageviews dropped about 10%. That's about inline with what I expected. 50% is not reasonable to chalk up to overlays.

 

[Neal]

Make the switch. As long as people feel safer when using the site....

 

[Anthony Parsons]

I'd really appreciate if someone could brief the exacts steps involved in migrating the site.

Well... you install your SSL cert.
Then change all your board options to reference https
You will have to change any embeds, such as video, to pull https
You will have to change any custom style references that pull from any third party sites, to their https version.
Then add a rewrite rule specific to your setup to force anything requested on port 80 to port 443.

That's really it. It's a pretty simple process.

 

[eva2000]

I did it not because of SEO, but because of SPDY 3.1

same did it for SPDY SSL much faster https://community.centminmod.com/threads/google-spdy-ssl-vs-non-spdy-ssl.1098/

Is SPDY easy to install and run with Xenforo? How is your experience with SPDY? Any downsides?

@RoldanLT and I use Centmin Mod Nginx LEMP web stack and this is how SPDY/3.1 SSL was implemented - full outline including buying and configuring the SSL certificate and Nginx vhost + benefits of SPDY SSL http://centminmod.com/nginx_configure_https_ssl_spdy.html

And for Centmin Mod LEMP stack users all you need to know for Google and https ranking signal https://community.centminmod.com/threads/https-as-a-google-ranking-signal.1052/