> Google treat the http and https versions of a domain as SEPARATE PROPERTIES.
That's not quite accurate. It's on a per-URL basis, not properties. Webmaster Tools asks you to verify the different _sites_ (HTTP/HTTPS, www/non-www) separately because they can be very different. And yes I've personally seen a few cases - one somewhat strange example bluntly chides their users when they visit the HTTP site and tells them to visit the site again as HTTPS.
> This means that even if you 301 every http page to https when you transition, all of your current rankings and pagerank will be irrelevant.
That's not true. If you correctly redirect and do other details correctly (no mixed content, no inconsistent rel=canonical links, and everything else mentioned in the I/O video I referenced), then our algos will consolidate the indexing properties onto the HTTPS URLs. This is just another example of correctly setting up canonicalization.
By the way, if you're moving to HTTPS, following our site moves guidelines:
But you did say you have a client with an issue. I suspect they either implemented the move to HTTPS incorrectly or something else is going on. Please ask for more help at our forums:
Nope, we followed the instructions to the tee. Straight 301 redirects from http to https, appropriate canonicals on all pages referencing https, and their SEO has seemingly started from scratch - used to be in position 1 for a variety of important keywords and searches, now they're beyond page 10.
That's not quite accurate. It's on a per-URL basis, not properties. Webmaster Tools asks you to verify the different _sites_ (HTTP/HTTPS, www/non-www) separately because they can be very different. And yes I've personally seen a few cases - one somewhat strange example bluntly chides their users when they visit the HTTP site and tells them to visit the site again as HTTPS.
> This means that even if you 301 every http page to https when you transition, all of your current rankings and pagerank will be irrelevant.
That's not true. If you correctly redirect and do other details correctly (no mixed content, no inconsistent rel=canonical links, and everything else mentioned in the I/O video I referenced), then our algos will consolidate the indexing properties onto the HTTPS URLs. This is just another example of correctly setting up canonicalization.
By the way, if you're moving to HTTPS, following our site moves guidelines:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/6033102?hl=en&re...
specifically, the site moves with URL changes:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033049?hl=en&r...
But you did say you have a client with an issue. I suspect they either implemented the move to HTTPS incorrectly or something else is going on. Please ask for more help at our forums:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!categories/webmaste...