Please refer to my previous post. It has now been 4 days since I inserted the “site map” and this is what has happened:
When I search for whysun.com and / or Whycal’s Blog the first result is the old “HTTP” Home Page. However, my “About” page as well as the July post for “Google and Bing Not Seeing My Move To HTTPS” plus a number of (but not all) individual topic headings come up as HTTPS.
But, it just so happens that I was listening to the latest Episode (No 674) of the Security Now Podcast and the hosts were discussing this subject or more particularly the move by Google Chrome to start flagging non HTTPS sites as not secure. Starting at about the 52 minute mark, Steve Gibson explained that, where the search terms do not specify HTTPS, the default is to display the HTTP page.
So that would mean, with my site, as long as there is a cached HTTP version of the Home Page somewhere in the search chain, the HTTP version will continue to be returned until any cached versions are removed. This appears to be what is happening.
Version 68 of Chrome will start flagging non-HTTPS sites as unsecure, but the default will continue to be to display the HTTP version first.
I had version 67 of Chrome so I updated to 68.
The co-host Jason Howell said the he uses a Chrome Extension called HTTPS EVERYWHERE that looks for HTTPS first. You can get HTTPS EVERYEHERE from the Chrome Web Store.
I went ahead and installed this extension, but it made no difference.
Consequently, I decided to use the Google “Remove Outdated Content” tool to ask it to remove “http”. I will wait and see what happens now.
Some minutes later this request was declined with a number of generic reasons listed including things like “already removed” and “duplicate request” etc.. But the one that caught my eye was “The content you submitted for cache removal appears on a third-party page.”
Numerous Google searches suggested that the “third party” would more than likely be WordPress and/or GoDaddy and there is supposed to be a “clear cache” option in both.
I have informed Google and Bing search, cleared my Browsers and flushed the DNS cache on my computer, altered all of the links in WordPress and the GoDaddy WordPress Application (see previous post for details) plus the link in Open Live Writer that I use to write these blog posts.
Therefore, the problem is almost certain to be with caching of the home page by either WordPress or GoDaddy. I logged into my WordPress Admin but the only “Clear Cache” I could find was in Google Analytics and clearing this did not solve the problem. Same with GoDaddy C Panel, I could not find a way to clear any cache.
So, it looks like I will have to live with the problem until it fixes itself.
