HTTPS Certificate Expired. Website with https urls now still in index issue.

[daveza]

Hi Guys

This week the Security certificate of our website expired and basically we now have to wail till next Tuesday for it to be re-instated.

So now obviously our website is now index with the https urls, and we had to drop the https from our site, so that people will not be faced with a security risk screen, which most browsers give you, to ask if you are sure that you want to visit the site, because it's seeing it as an untrusted one.

So now we are basically sitting with the site urls, only being www...

My question what should we do, in order to prevent google from penalizing us, since obviously if googlebot comes to crawl these urls, there will be nothing.

I did however re-submitted it to Google to crawl it, but I guess it's going to take time, before Google picks up that now only want the www urls in the index.

Can somebody please give me some advice on this.

Thanks

Dave

[Kara.Wallace]

Hi Dave,

If I were in your shoes, I'd set up a rule to 302 redirect all of your https pages to their http equivalent until Tuesday when you get your cert.

This will make it so if anyone clicks on your https pages in Google's index that they will be brought to the appropriate page and not get a security warning.

The 302 will also tell Google "Hey, this is just a temporary redirect... don't worry about indexing things differently." - because if you get Google to index all of the http versions and if you don't 301 those, you will get a ton of 404 errors. Which is fine... but it gets messy fast.

Hope that helps.

Mike

[Highland]

Why is it going to take 4 days for them to fix your SSL? That's the question I would want answered in your position. SSL certificates are easy to replace so what's the holdup here?

[Kara.Wallace]

My guess would be the person in charge of procuring and/or installing the cert took a day of vacation today and Monday things are closed for the Labor Day holiday... just guessing : )

That or just working it into their schedule. Sometimes at larger companies the people managing the website for SEO/Content/etc. are not the same people managing things on the back-end.