Confusion: Google Search Console's HTTPS Is Invalid And Might Prevent Indexing

Sep 19, 2022 - 7:51 am 3 by

Google Http Sites

Last week, Google rolled out a new Search Console report for HTTPS, and with that came a lot of confusion around a specific error. The error was "HTTPS is invalid and might prevent it from being indexed." This shows in the URL inspection tool, which was part of this upgrade.

John Mueller from Google did say this morning on Twitter that they dug through these reports and will be updating the warnings to make them "less scary." While the errors are correct, he said, the warnings are just an FYI and "not an error" that is causing issues in Google Search, he added.

Here is one of many screenshots of this error:

click for full size

This does not mean the URL won't be indexed, it means Google has never seen the URL, or has seen the URL but not crawled it yet. Google may also be indexing the HTTP version of that URL instead for the time being.

There are countless tweets and threads with confusion over this specific error. Here are some threads on Google Webmaster Help, Black Hat World and on Twitter.

John Mueller of Google has been responding to some of these concerns explaining this is not something to worry about. He said on Twitter "HTTPS would not prevent a page from being indexed. It might prevent it from being indexed as HTTPS, but we'd still index it as HTTP. We just don't index all pages on sites, that's expected, and independent of HTTPS status."

Here is where John said they will be changing things to make it clearer:

As Glenn Gabe pointed out, if you look at the help documentation this can mean "Google has never seen the URL, or has seen the URL but not crawled it yet."

So I wouldn't worry too much about this error.

If you see the pages are not being indexed, I doubt it is related to this error - I would suspect it is more of a quality issue.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

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