Issue with redirecting an HTTP homepage to an HTTPS homepage

Issue with redirecting an HTTP homepage to an HTTPS homepage - If a page has internal and external outgoing links to redirecting URLs, it’s returning 3xx (301, 302, etc.) HTTP status codes standing for redirection. This issue means that the page does not exist on a permanent or temporary basis. It appears on most of the popular web browsers, usually caused by a misconfigured website. However, there are some steps you can take to ensure the issue isn’t on your side. You can find more details about redirecting URLs by reading the Google Search Central overview. In this article, we’ll go over how you can fix the Issue with redirecting an HTTP homepage to an HTTPS homepage error on your web browser. Problem :

In July, we changed our homepage to HTTPS via a 301 redirect from HTTP (the only page on our site with HTTPS). Even though we have significantly increased backlinks to our homepage, we have had no change in search ranking.

Do we need to submit a new sitemap or update our robots.txt file in order for Google to correctly associate our HTTPS homepage with our site?

We noticed that our Google Webmasters Tools account is not showing us any stats for our homepage so we added an HTTPS Google Webmasters Tools account in order to track info to the homepage. The HTTPS account ONLY shows us stats for the homepage which gives the impression it is reading our homepage as a separate site than the rest of our site.

Solution :

HTTP vs HTTPS is a canonicalization issue. You should choose either secure or insecure and make it the canonical version. It sounds like you tried to do so with your home page and 301 redirects. In this case, I would suggest that you use a rel=canonical meta tag instead.

You also need to pay attention to how your site is linking to itself. If somebody visits the secure home page, make sure that they stay on the secure version of your site as they click around. Similarly, users without encryption should be able to click around without it unless they get to a portion of your site that would require it (such as checkout).

There is nothing inherently wrong with allowing Googlebot to crawl both your HTTP and HTTPS sites. That is a common scenario and Googlebot is well equipped to handle it. You may certainly register both versions in webmaster tools. I would only submit a sitemap for the one that you consider the canonical.

It also sounds like you expected the combined weight of the links into both versions of your page to boost your rankings once the two were combined. In my experience this doesn't happen. Possibly because your site was already getting the benefit from all those links because Google was already treating the HTTP and HTTPS pages as a single entity in terms of Pagerank.

We hope that this article has helped you resolve the seo, google-search-console, redirects error in your web browsers. Enjoy browsing the internet uninterrupted!