Google announced an adjustment to the way sites’ index status data appears in Webmaster Tools. The index status feature now tracks a site’s indexed URLs for both HTTP and HTTPS as well as for verified subdirectories. In the past, it didn’t show data for HTTPS sites independently. Everything was included in the HTTP report.
The move makes a great deal of sense as more and more sites move over to HTTPS (at least partially), and according to the company, people have been asking for this change.
Google’s John Mueller said, “If you’re a data-driven SEO (or just love to see how your site’s indexed), you’ll love this change.”
Now, each of these will show their own data in the Webmaster Tools Index Status report as long as they’re each verified separately:
http://www.example.com/
https://www.example.com/
http://example.com
https://example.com
http://www.example.com/folder/
https://www.example.com/folder/
http://example.com/folder/
https://example.com/folder/
Google notes that if you have a site on HTTPS or if some of your content is indexed under different subdomains, you’ll see a change that looks something like this:
“In order to see your data correctly, you will need to verify all existing variants of your site (www., non-www., HTTPS, subdirectories, subdomains) in Google Webmaster Tools. We recommend that your preferred domains and canonical URLs are configured accordingly,” says Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji. “Note that if you wish to submit a Sitemap, you will need to do so for the preferred variant of your website, using the corresponding URLs. Robots.txt files are also read separately for each protocol and hostname.”
You can read up more on all of this here.
Image via Google