Exactly a week ago I migrated this site to HTTPS and truth is, it is almost impossible to check rankings and traffic for a site like this when making these changes. News sites can get bursts of traffic, not based on rankings or algorithm changes, but more often than not, based on what news you are publishing. So spikes and dips are mostly dependent on what you write about here.
That being said, there are certain things I can cover, such as index rate, and weird search results.
For the most part, most of the site is now indexed by Google under HTTPS, in fact, I believe it only took Google a few days to pick up on 80% of the site under HTTPS. The XML sitemap is indexed at exactly the same level as the HTTP version:
But as @rubanktseo pointed out, Twitter outranks me for a search on the site's domain name: [seroundtable].
But it doesn't out rank me for the site name itself: [search engine roundtable].
Outside of that, truth is, traffic seems very normal. I have not seen many issues but I do find little SSL mismatch errors that I patch every now and then. But all seems solid. Google News picked up on the change, which was a concern. So things seem fine with the migration.
Here is traffic limited by Google organic search for the past week, compared to the prior week, so as you can see, it is up a bit but again, mostly because of story selection:
I also migrated my corporate site to HTTPS and I am keeping a daily log of the search queries report, sitemap indexed and even tracking organic search traffic changes but like this site, not much has changed. Things seem very normal and surprisingly simple. My corporate site has taken much longer to update with Google, but that makes sense, since it is not updated as often as this site. I feel like that site is a much better barometer for these migrations, but I wanted to test also moving a Google News site.
So far, so good and things are incredibly calm and nothing exciting to report - which is a good thing.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
