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Huge Drop in Bing Ranking after switching to SSL/https (even 5 months later)

Discussion in 'Bing' started by okgaz, Nov 1, 2017.

  1. #1
    My site was sitting happily at #1 in Bing and getting some great traffic. As it's encouraged by Google I moved the site from http to https. My site dropped instantly from Bing and now 5 months later it's still #22 and getting no search engine traffic. I used 301 redirects. I checked my Bing webmaster tools and Bing is still crawling the same number of pages as before the move. Is there anything I should check or anything I can do? Has anybody else experienced this?

    Also let this be a warning to anybody else who ranks well in Bing who is thinking of switching to https, might not be the best idea!
     
    okgaz, Nov 1, 2017 IP
  2. dscurlock

    dscurlock Prominent Member

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    #2
    I am not saying this is your case, however, I have read cases where people have made changes on their site, and their rankings
    took a noise dive, and never returned to normal, assuming nothing else is wrong with your site, then you may simply need to
    do better SEO on your site in order to pull your ranking back up again. What you should do is find a good seo provider that
    can analyze and audit your site, and they may be able to tell you exactly what the problem is.

    Here is my personal opinion, after your change, and your ranking did not come close to what it was before, then
    I am thinking there is something else wrong; when you made a change to your site, you sent a signal to search engines,
    and when they analyzed your site, then they may have determined that something was wrong or your site should be
    better, and based off their info could have lowered your rankings to where it should be, in other words, your ranking
    may have not been actual at the time, and search engines simply made the ranking adjustment where it should be now.....

    The only way to know for sure is to get your site analyzed and audited....

    There are several factors that could lower your rankings:

    1: Making changes to your site
    2: visitors not finding your site useful ie: bad content...
    3: too many bad backlinks, and you should audit your backlinks often.
    4: too many anchor keywords will land you a penalty also....
    5: Losing good backlinks can cause you to lose rankings...

    overall, if your rankings did not return close to normal, then it is very
    likely that your site may have other issues....

    and do not give out fake warnings that https caused you harm, at this
    point, it is safe to say neither one of us knows what the real cause is....
     
    Last edited: Nov 1, 2017
    dscurlock, Nov 1, 2017 IP
  3. jr777

    jr777 Member

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    #3
    Maybe it matters where your SSL certificate comes from? I've heard of SSLs costing thousands a month while others are free.
     
    jr777, Nov 1, 2017 IP
  4. dscurlock

    dscurlock Prominent Member

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    #4
    hosting providers have been offering free SSL for sometime now...
    however, if the SSL is not configured properly, then maybe, but most
    of your rankings should have returned within 1-2 months after the change.

    http://www.seoblog.com/2017/07/rankings-drop-https-ssl/

    apparently this is not all that uncommon, do some searching on:
    "can SSL cause my site to drop rankings" or variations....

    Can a bad host cause you to lose rankings?
    absolutely!

    however, we are not psychics...
     
    dscurlock, Nov 1, 2017 IP
  5. dscurlock

    dscurlock Prominent Member

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    #5
    dscurlock, Nov 1, 2017 IP
  6. David Morrison

    David Morrison Active Member

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    #6
    Use this tool to check for any problems with your SSL certificate: https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html

    Also SSL uses more data, could it be that your have a cheap host and your website is slowed down and that's why Bing of deranked you?
     
    David Morrison, Nov 4, 2017 IP
    jr777 likes this.
  7. jr777

    jr777 Member

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    #7
    Thanks! I have a free Let's Encrypt SSL and it got a perfect score. Actually, I have four sites all running Let's Encrypt SSLs and all of them have perfect scores.
     
    jr777, Nov 4, 2017 IP