Switching to HTTPS changes the site’s address as far as Yandex is concerned, so it follows the mirror procedure rather than being a purely technical change. Yandex recommends the move, and notes that the HTTP version may remain available if there is a reason for it.
Step 1 — the certificate
Certificates differ by validation level: DV confirms the domain, OV confirms the domain belongs to a specific company, and EV requires extended verification of a legal entity and is part of global financial-industry standards. For a single domain any type works, including for the www and non-www forms; multiple domains need a certificate covering a defined list of URLs; subdomains take DV. After installation, verify with the server response check — SSL errors are reported there, and they are resolved through the certificate authority or the hosting provider, not by editing the site.
Step 2 — internal links, which is where migrations fail
An HTTPS page containing HTTP references is treated as insecure by browsers, robots and other services. Change the protocol in:
- Internal links to pages.
- Internal links to files — CSS, JavaScript, images.
- Links inside the sitemap.
- The
Sitemapdirective inrobots.txt. - Alternate language links (
hreflang).
Yandex’s practical suggestion is to make internal links relative — /page/ rather than the absolute address — which removes this class of problem permanently.
One detail that catches analytics teams: links or ad blocks pointing at HTTP resources can break referrer attribution, so traffic sources are recorded incorrectly. Adding <meta name="referrer" content="origin"/> passes protocol and domain and restores it.
Steps 3 to 5 — verify, redirect, relocate
Confirm the site loads over HTTPS with a valid connection indicator, set 301/302 redirects page to page (not everything to the home page), and submit the move through Indexing → Relocate site. As with any mirror change, expect several weeks and enable the notification.
The expectation to set
Merging transfers some signals and external links, and guarantees nothing about position or traffic. A migration executed carefully is uneventful; one executed with blanket redirects and mixed content is not.
So setzen wir das um
The step clients skip is the internal-link sweep, and it is the one that produces mixed-content warnings, broken analytics and a slow migration all at once. We convert internal links to relative paths during the move for exactly the reason Yandex gives — it stops the problem recurring the next time anything about the address changes. The referrer meta tag is worth adding at the same time; without it the client sees direct traffic where search traffic used to be, and draws entirely the wrong conclusion.
Verwandte Leistungen