Redirecting HTTP to HTTPS - How long does it take Google to re-index the site?

[joony]

hello Moz

We know that this year, Moz changed its domain to moz.com from www.seomoz.org
however, when you type "site:seomoz.org" you still can find old urls indexed on Google (on page 7 and above)

We also changed our site from http://www.example.com to https://www.example.com
And Google is indexing both sites even though we did proper 301 redirection via htaccess.

1. How long would it take Google to refresh the index? We just don't worry about it?
2. Say we redirected our entire site. What is going to happen to those websites that copied and pasted our content? We have already DMCAed their webpages, but making our site https would mean that their website is now more original than our site? Thus, Google assumes that we have copied their site? (Google is very slow on responding to our DMCA complaint)

Thank you in advance for your reply.

[MChuckGreen]

Unfortunately, the answer is "it depends".

I do have some recent experience with this for 2 very small sites (one has around 300 indexed URL, the other has around 70), which you may find useful.

In each case, it took just a day or two to get the most important URLs (best rankings, traffic, link authority, etc.) swapped in for their non-https counterparts. However, deeper URLs with little link authority took up to 90 days to be swapped out.

If your most important URLs don't get swapped out in a week or so, I would check these things:

• Make sure you've updated internal links so that they point to the https URLs. You don't want to pass your link authority through 301s anyways.
• Make sure all versions of the site are verified in GWT, setting the https version as the preferred version.
• Make sure your sitemaps (XML and HTML) contain the https versions of your URLs
• Make sure that the https URLs do not have the non-https URL's set as the canonical version.

Hope this helps and good luck!

[EricaMcGillivray]

Google is super fast when it comes to the main, most important stuff on your domain. It's still indexing stuff from the old SEOmoz.org domain because we have a ton of pages! and frankly, some of them aren't very popular. We also made the decision not to redirect every single page and killed a ton of them. The less popular pages are lingering (though with the right 301 redirects, we're still getting that traffic to the still important to us pages) with SEOmoz.org, either waiting to be indexed at Moz.com or tossed out as they no longer exist.

For dealing with people who are scraping your site, make sure you have canonical tags implemented on your pages for your shiny new https site. Most scrapers steal the code, so they grab those too.

[Shakur]

Hi there,

Google says in their guidelines: The time it takes Googlebot and our systems to discover and process all URLs in the site move depends on how fast your servers are and how many URLs are involved. As a general rule, a medium-sized website can take a few weeks for most pages to move, and larger sites take longer. The speed at which Googlebot and our systems discover and process moved URLs depends the number of URLs and the server speed.

You can find out all the information here https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033080?hl=en

Hope it helps you.