HTTPS, free certificates and Google seo

[anitawapa]

As we all know, Google decided to give some weight in rankings to encrypted sites. SSL certificate providers are quite a lot out there, but there is also a free alternative (Let’s Encrypt). I've been going over some of these services and compared Godaddy's and the above certificates, and there isn't much of a difference.

The question is: using a free certificate would have the same effect as a paid one? I would rather pay for one than be punished for using a free one, but free would be good too.
What's your take on this?

Thank you

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi Adriana,

The whole point of an SSL certificate is so that the browser has a reasonable degree of trust in the server's public key for HTTPS transactions. As per my opinion SSL has advantages for SEO and also for creating trust with the website visitors.

Do the SSL certificate actually matter, you should read this study / research http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2015/03/03/https-vs-http-website-ssl-tls-encryption-ranking-seo-secure-connection/

Generally, browsers come pre-loaded with lists of people/organizations that the browser should trust.  When your website presents this certificate to a browser and the browser would unquestioningly accept it (assuming that you've paid a sufficiently well-known CA (certifying authority ) that is likely to be in the trusted lists of all browsers).

Now, it's the trust level of these CA which matters to the browsers and search engines, then there are risks / disadvantages of using free certificates. Check following links

https://www.cybersecureasia.com/blog/the-risk-in-free-ssl-certificate
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-using-a-free-SSL-Certificate-for-signing-and-encrypting-email
https://www.volusion.com/ecommerce-blog/articles/5-reasons-you-should-beware-of-free-ssl-certificates/

Coming back to original question, whether free vs paid SSL would matter for SEO, on the surface, it looks it won't matter if your CA has enough trust with browsers, however, if you scratch the surface there are some hidden facts which are highlighted in the disadvantages of a Free SSL mentioned on above links.

It would be better to get a paid certificate, be safe and secure without being worried about if it would hurt your SEO.

I hope this helps, let me know if you have further questions via your response.

Regards,

Vijay

[ThomasHarvey]

Letsencrypt is a great way of offering SSL. It's backed by a LOT of big organisations: https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/

"using a free certificate would have the same effect as a paid one? I would rather pay for one than be punished for using a free one, but free would be good too."
I am confident that as long as the site is secure, the level of encryption does not matter. As then SEO would become "pay to win" which I don't think is the case.

[anitawapa]

Thank you for answering my question! Another one if I may ask: how do you add the website to Google Console? Let's say my site is site.com

I have already added in Google Console the following

site.com

www.site.com (as preferred version)

and now adding https://www.site.com

I have removed the sitemaps added to www.site.com and added them into the https://www.site.com, but is that all that needs to be done? Unfortunately the site move tool Google provides does not take moving from http to https into account.

Thank you

[Dmilliman]

If there are redirects on your site from http to https, I believe the best practice is to actually leave your old sitemap in place in the http property, as well as submitting the new ssl sitemap to that property.

We learned this AFTER recently moving from http to https and most of our URL structure changing as well. However, with 301s set up for as many site URLs as possible, we saw the new ones gain in indexation and rank rather quickly, even without the old http sitemap.