After Google launched their HTTPS ranking signal some savvy SEOs and webmasters noticed SSL errors spewing from Google.
Both Dave Naylor and Jennifer Slegg covered the issue, showing prompts and warnings of broken SSL certificates, when there should not have been HTTPS or SSL on that page anyway.
Here are screen shots:
Now, I brought Google's John Mueller into the conversation on this at Twitter and he says the SSL certificates are indeed misconfigured. But the issue is, this is not always in the webmasters control.
First John said nothing changed with HTTPS around this, that the errors are not necessarily new:
@yoast @SEO @DaveNaylor @rustybrick Nothing changed with HTTPS crawling with this update. I'll check some URLs if you have any in the posts
— John Mueller (@JohnMu) August 12, 2014@SEO @yoast @DaveNaylor @rustybrick We sent those in April - your site responds w/HTTPS, but the certificate is bad: http://t.co/wFco2zLDhn
— John Mueller (@JohnMu) August 12, 2014But webmasters are being notified of errors in Webmaster Tools, here is one public screen shot from @SEO:
But the truth is, the site does respond with HTTPS but there is a mismatch error according to Qualys.
But the issue is, with shared hosts, CDNs and so on, the webmaster cannot always make the change and fix this issue themselves.
@rustybrick @JohnMu @SEO @yoast yer I have ask wells fargo to remove their ssl so to stop effecting the other site
— Dave Naylor (@DaveNaylor) August 13, 2014@DaveNaylor @rustybrick @JohnMu @SEO LOL. That. I'll do the same with Foursquare, Twitter and the other companies using fast.ly
— Joost de Valk (@yoast) August 13, 2014John does admit that Google can try to do a better job communicating that:
@rustybrick @SEO @yoast @DaveNaylor We could do better on the site-query, but the origin is the site. Other sites=other problems, usually.
— John Mueller (@JohnMu) August 12, 2014But I do not see any changes being made by Google or the webmasters at this point to address these concerns.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
