Goossips SEO: Crawl, 404 & HTTPS

If Google is trying to crawl your 404s, that’s actually a good sign

A user was worried to see Googlebot continue to crawl nonexistent pages (returning a 404), thinking it was wasting their crawl budget. John Mueller reassured the user, noting that these repeated crawls of 404 pages are not problematic and can even be interpreted as a positive signal. It means Google is willing to retrieve more content from the site.
Why these repeated visits despite the 404 errors? Because Google re-crawls as a precaution, in case their disappearance was accidental. Switching to 410 (page permanently removed) wouldn’t change much, although Google might remove those pages from its index slightly faster.

Source : Search Engine Journal

Contrary to what some may still think, a 404 page is not necessarily a page "to be fixed," unless there is a clearly identified problem. That’s why Google may come back several times "just in case." As John Mueller says, you should see this as good news, because it means Google is paying attention to your site.

Goossip #2

Loss of ranking after an HTTPS migration is temporary and normal

The owner of a 15-year-old finance site panicked after losing his top-3 Google positions following a migration to HTTPS. He had also changed his WordPress theme and updated his content, and asked whether he should revert to HTTP.

John Mueller explains that migrating to HTTPS is akin to a complete site migration. Each URL must be individually recognized, re-crawled and re-processed by Google. You simply need to be patient. He also warns against using the URL removal tool, which could also hide the new HTTPS URLs.

Source : Search Engine Journal

It’s a common fear that should be put into perspective. Google has been dealing with HTTPS migrations for many years. There’s therefore no particular reason to be overly worried about it.