Potential Cloudflare Problem

I using Cloudflare at a couple of domains.
I don´t use SSL certificates on this domains.
During couple of weeks i saw a slow but steady step by step downward trend in Google and i had not really an explanation!
Today i realized that Cloudflare has an active SSL certificate for each domain you add there!

Following problem occurs, ... however, Google started to crawl the https version of this domain too and indexed them!
For sure i didn't expect that and couldn't setup a matching redirect in htaccess ...

And in the end i have not 500 indexed urls under that domain but 1000 and a typical duplicated content problem!
So if you use Cloudflare and you don't want a running https version, take care that you disable SSL in your Cloudflare account!

I'm glad I read this thread. That explains why google has been indexing a lot of https urls when I don't use them.

Is there a quick way to check for this?

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Originally Posted by Online-casinos.co.uk

Is there a quick way to check for this?

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Check PM

The problem you're describing is probably more common than we think. But the way to go is not to disable SSL on Cloudflare, but to make sure you redirect to the proper version.

You have www and non-www version of your site.
You have http and https version of your site.
That's a total of four possibilities for URLs, and you should pick one and redirect the others.

There's no way around that. It's common practice and something every webmaster should do when launching a new website.

And you should also have four Google Webmaster Tools websites added, for all four versions, and only one will be active.

Yes, right. I do so for www and no-www problematic by default.
If i use SSL i add a proper redirect too!
But i saw no occasion to add a redirect for something that shouldn't be active :-)
So ... my way was to deactivate SSL and ask Google for a re-crawl.
Hope that will fix the serps.

Sorry for bringing this old thread up.

I have also just started using cloudflare and activated ssl. It seems to be working smoothly as the http://www.domain / http://domain and https://www.domain are all good, redirecting etc. My domain to go for is https://www.domain. There is only one problem though, when typing https://domain its not redirecting or anything but "site not found" error. So basically its working except the non www https version. Can anyone help me here? Excuse me but I am not the most technical guy.

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Originally Posted by DanHorvat

That's a total of four possibilities for URLs

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It's actually 5 if you have a dedicated IP ;)

Does anyone have the redirect code for .htaccess file so it goes to https?

Also in Wordpress -General strings do I change that to https?

If so does that cause problems with images etc..?

These are the codes I use on my websites. The first code is for non-www to www and http to https, and the second one is for www to non-www and http to https:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) https://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Thanks Vardan

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DanHorvat

The problem you're describing is probably more common than we think. But the way to go is not to disable SSL on Cloudflare, but to make sure you redirect to the proper version.

You have www and non-www version of your site.
You have http and https version of your site.
That's a total of four possibilities for URLs, and you should pick one and redirect the others.

There's no way around that. It's common practice and something every webmaster should do when launching a new website.

And you should also have four Google Webmaster Tools websites added, for all four versions, and only one will be active.

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Hi Dan,

A quick question I set up all four in WMT and I think I have redirected to the main one https. Do I need to submit a sitemap on each of the four accounts? Or just the one that is to be used?