One SSL Certificate for Hundreds of Corporate Websites

[chrisvogel]

This post is deleted!

[GlobeRunner]

Chris, great question. You really have two issues here. The first being the SSL certificate issue, and the second being the duplicate content issue.

Regarding the SSL certificate, as long as the domain is listed in the certificate it should be fine--cloudflare.com does it this way and offers free SSL certificates for every site, and it's not an SEO issue. As long as the certificates are valid I don't see an SEO issue. I prefer to have one certificate per domain, but that's not an SEO issue.

The other issue, however, is a duplicate content issue. The user is presented the non-secure version. So when do they get to the HTTPs version? Do they ever? Also, what happens to the search engines when they crawl? Do they get the HTTP or HTTPs version?

Seems to me that the best solution here, if you cannot 301 redirect all HTTP requests to the HTTPs version would be to use the canonical tag to specify the HTTPs version.

[kwoolf]

For your SSL issue, take a look at Let's Encrypt. As far as SEO and duplicate content, search engines typically can't index content behind pay walls and logins unless you're using a CMS with this feature (bots allowed access to articles). Beware of your visitor interactions, like sharing page or product URLs that are access controlled. This would have negative consequences for SEO as potential visitors would be redirected to a login page instead of the intended content, but many people would bounce away from this page. That's a signal to search engine that nobody is finding what they're looking for on you site for those related links. A 100% bounce rate would not be great.