XenForo On HTTPS -> Did it affect Google Rankings?

[TheBigK]

I see that XF is fully on HTTPS. I've been planning to move my site to HTTPS as well; but the only thing that's holding me from switching is the fear that all the 301s I'll need.

In 2011, when we moved our site from vB (+vBSEO) to XF; we suffered a lot because of the traffic going down ~50% (even with all the 301 redirects in place).

The 'sane' thing to do is to remain with http; but in future we'll need to move to https. Would love to know whether XF's traffic has been affected after the move.

 

[Mike]

Not seeing any real difference.

 

[rdn]

301 Redirect from old vbulletin url to xenforo structured url is way too much different than http > https redirect.
So should not suffer any loss.

 

[TheBigK]

301 Redirect from old vbulletin url to xenforo structured url is way too much different than http > https redirect.
So should not suffer any loss.

Aren't the URLs different? Even if a letter changes, we land on an entirely different location. Would really love to have opinions from admins/owners who've switched from http to https.

 

[rdn]

2 year old video

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[TheBigK]

Here's an older one from Matt -

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basically says 'I damn don't know'.

I'd trust more on experiences shared by people than Matt Cutts. I've nothing against him; but his advise doesn't always work as it should.

 

[Paul B]

Matt Cutts should stick to his day job.

Oh wait...

 

[rdn]

I'd trust more on experiences shared by people than Matt Cutts. I've nothing against him; but his advise doesn't always work as it should.

That's 2011 video.
It's already 2014 now

 

[rdn]

If you are still confuse?
Here's the latest blog: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal_6.html
Which I think most of us already read

 

[TheBigK]

If you are still confuse?
Here's the latest blog: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal_6.html
Which I think most of us already read

I agree that it's an old video. My entire concern is about 301s affecting the site's performance. I have already read the blog post from Google. I'm concerned about real life experiences from web masters who've switched from http to https with proper 301 redirects.

Frankly speaking; Google's theory is different and practicals are different. We did suffer huge traffic loss for over ~3 years even after following Google's instructions and setting up proper redirects from our old vBSEO setup. If I get 100% responses that say 'the traffic wasn't affected', I'm all game for HTTPS. Else - I'd rather rank #3 or #4 than aiming for #2 or #1 with HTTPS over the rivals.

 

[Ridemonkey]

Out of curiosity, and slightly off topic, did your traffic drop happen immediately/almost immediately, or did it slowly trail off over time?

 

[rdn]

We did suffer huge traffic loss for over ~3 years even after following Google's instructions and setting up proper redirects from our old vBSEO setup.

Looks like the migration from vb to xf is not the reason, Google SEO has a lot of factors to consider.
Maybe you are affected by Google Panda, Penguin Update.

 

[TheBigK]

Out of curiosity, and slightly off topic, did your traffic drop happen immediately/almost immediately, or did it slowly trail off over time?

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.

Maybe you are affected by Google Panda, Penguin Update.

Maybe. But the traffic went down almost after we made the switch. That's a different debate, I believe.

I'm looking for experiences of people who've made the switch; preferably all the XF owners with at least 50K visitors / month.

 

[melbo]

Switched to full https in March and saw no downward change in traffic. We forced all urls to www and https with a 301.

 

[Rigel Kentaurus]

I have a similar experience.

I switched 2 sites to https, back when it didn't matter at all for SEO purposes, but I was afraid that it would impact organic traffic due to the change in URL even when a redirection 80 -> 443 was in place.

This was done last May, and here are the traffic results


Nothing significant, either positive or negative.

I am now waiting to see if being through https will result in a net increase of traffic now that the rules have changed (even a 1% would be nice), but I am not holding any hopes.

I'm kind of sad of seeing people now wanting to switch because of the SEO. I did it for the security. I was not feeling confortable with the idea that the forum session could be hijacked at any time in an extremely easy way.

 

[rdn]

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

 

[Chris D]

I did it for the security.

I did too and to be consistent with the experience when compared to this site where a lot of my traffic would come from. Payments aren't handled at my site directly, you are sent off to PayPal, of course, but I think if you're selling products or services you should still make an effort to ensure the overall experience is safe.

 

[Jeffin]

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

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

 

[Anthony Parsons]

I've changed two XF installs to https over the years, and there were zero changes in traffic during those times.

 

[TheBigK]

I'd really appreciate if someone could brief the exacts steps involved in migrating the site. I think we can give it a try as well. Are there any special considerations we need to make before we decide on switching (with respect to add ons / structure etc.)?