Your November 2018 Search Engine Bytes Digest
 by Kristi Hagen

Trouble shooting the HTTPS transition and Google Search Console Performance reporting details

  • Like everyone, I've received emails from Google saying "mobile-first indexing has been enabled" for many client sites with even though some aren't responsive yet.

    So, looking at the Google Search Console reports I found one site we moved to HTPPS on July 5 — and according to the Perfomance Overview report — clicks grew over time through 8/12. Then they dropped significantly and flatlined on 8/20.

    The URL displayed in Search Console is: https://www.clientswidgets.com

    I thought I'd established the canonical site URL as: https://clientswidgets.com

    However when I entered the URL, https://clientswidgets.com in Search Console, it responds "URL not in property".

    If I enter https://www.clientswidgets.com, I get this message "Referring page - https://clientswidgets.com" and a note of "User-declared canonical - https://clientswidgets.com" and a note to advise "Google-selected canonical - URL cannot be displayed because it's not in any of your properties".

    Clearly I have done something wrong or forgot to do something. Here are the setup details:

    • WP dashboard – The WordPress dashboard has site as https://clientswidgets.com for WordPress and site URL.
    • .htaccess – Following redirect info added per host instructions:

      RewriteEngine On
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/[0-9]+\..+\.cpaneldcv$
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/\.well-known/pki-validation/[A-F0-9]{32}\.txt(?:\ Comodo\ DCV)?$
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^clientswidgets\.com [NC,OR]
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.clientswidgets\.com [NC]
      RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
      RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://clientswidgets.com/$1 [R,L]
    • XML Sitemap – https://clientswidgets.com/page-sitemap.xml

    • Google Analytics – I updated Google Analytics to https but did not delete WWW until today. I also discovered that the link to sitemap in robots.txt file also had www included. So, I changed that and uploaded a new sitemap here: https://clientswidgets.com/robots.txt

      I would guess this would be the cause of all the problems but this was...

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