by SEO & Affiliate Consultant
M. Thomson
Always keeping the best interest of webmasters in mind, Google is now displaying SSL certificate warnings within Google Webmaster Tools.M. Thomson
Upon verification of a website in Google Webmaster Tools, Google notifies the webmaster of any serious issues or concerns that require attention. Previously, we have seen notifications for issues such as too many URLs and crawl rate changes, but bigmouthmedia has spotted that Google is now notifying webmasters when their SSL certificates are not recognised by web browsers.
When browsers such as Mozilla Firefox attempt to access a website, they first assess the website's SSL certificate to ensure that the user's security and integrity are maintained. If the SSL certificate is out of date or erroneous, the user will be prompted with a message asking them whether they wish to continue in spite of this issue.
As is also the case with Google's Malware warning, if a user is prompted with this message, it will likely impact the bounce rate of this user entering the website.
Now that Google is aware of this, it will send webmasters a notification within Google Webmaster Tools detailing the problem.
With web security an issue forever under scrutiny, this move shows that Google wants to ensure that your website is of the highest value, along with its search results. So subscribe to your "warnings" within Google Webmaster Tools now, and ensure that you never miss an issue.
Quality Signals
Search engines such as Google are known to use more than just links and on-page elements to determine the ranking of websites. Many Google assigned patents have discussed "out of the box" factors that they are willing to lean towards to improve the SERPs. Any search engine optimisation expert reading this will likely have just added SSL certificates to their list of quality signals, if they have not done so already.
