301 redirect http to https

Publishing help SEO
1

I recently built a new Webflow website for a client who had a http website. Since publishing to https it has lost all google ranking. How do I fix this? The video on 301 redirect does not help me. What specifically must I type into the 301 redirect? Why must it start with “/”

Here is my site Read-Only: https://www.francoiseharrison.com
(how to share your site Read-Only link)

2

Hi Monika,

A few notes for you;

  • Your http requests automatically redirect to https, that happens when you have SSL switched on, see the screenshot below.
  • Google MUCH prefers secure sites and will generally penalize or delist http sites, so this is much better.
  • Your site is still in Google SERPS, as you can see in the link

Everything looks good.
I’d guess what you’re seeing is Google Search Console results, which are probably still trying to monitor the http: URL. You’ll want to fix that.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.francoiseharrison.com&oq=site%3Awww.francoiseharrison.com

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3

Hi Michael. Many thanks for comprehensive reply. At least I know the technicalities of the 301 are OK. I added the site to Google Search Console at the beginning of the June so I will continue to request indexing in the hope that the website begins to feature in Google search results such as “Occupational Therapy Johannesburg”. When the old site was live that Google query would feature the site but site doesn’t come up now. Maybe its a matter of time and tweaking Meta descriptions?

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For any given keyword, you’d need to do your research using GSC and tools like AHrefs to see where you rank. Changing your site will certainly have impacts but as long as you kept your URLs, redirected old paths that have changed, etc. that impact should be reasonably low.

Google’s made a ton of major changes this year in April/May, which has affected everyone. In general they seem to be using AI more to evaluate and rank pages / sites, and to generate the listings.

Do your regular SEO tuning, but read what you can about the changes as well, because things like the META description matter very little now. Even page titles are becoming less controllable in SERPs.

As always if you need to be listed under a keyword, Adwords is your best bet.

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