It appears that some webmasters are now receiving warnings from Google Webmaster Tools about SSL certificate issues. A Google Webmaster Help thread has a couple people reporting receiving the warnings over the weekend.
Here is a copy of the SSL warning from Google:
Googlebot noticed your site host name, https://www.banknorwegian.no:443/, does not match your SSL certificate Subject Name August 20, 2009Dear Webmaster,
The host name of your site, https://www.banknorwegian.no:443/, does not match any of the "Subject Names" in your SSL certificate, which were:
* NotVerified
This will cause many web browsers to block users from accessing your site, or to display a security warning message when your site is accessed.
To correct this problem, please get a new SSL certificate by a Certificate Authority (CA) with a "Subject Name" or "Subject Alternative DNS Names" that matches your host name.
Thanks,
The Google Web Crawling Team
I am not sure if this warning is new, I have never seen this reported before. Now many more webmasters are noticing it, because there may be a bug in how Google detects such errors. Google's JohnMu said:
Generally speaking, we've added these messages to inform webmasters of issues with regards to their SSL certificates. This is just an informational message, it does not affect your site's crawling, indexing or ranking.It seems that some of you may be seeing this message despite having a valid SSL certificate. We're looking into this issue and will let you know more as soon as we can. In the mean time, if you're certain that your certificate is ok, then you can safely ignore this message.
So two take aways:
(1) SSL certificate warnings from Google does not generally impact your site's well being in the Google search results.
(2) There may be an issue with Google's SSL certificate reporting feature.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
