: Will not having https redirect from example.com to www.example.com affect SEO I've recently set up SSL for a bunch of my domains using a Positive SSL Multi-domain certificate from NameCheap, my

@Karen161

Posted in: #Https #Iis #Seo

I've recently set up SSL for a bunch of my domains using a Positive SSL Multi-domain certificate from NameCheap, my domain provider.

In the past when I was using single domain certificates, they would cover both the www domain and the non-www domain, like this:

example.com example.com


I set up IIS so that all these URLs would redirect to www.example.com:
example.com example.com www.example.com http://example.com www.example.com https://example.com


Everything was good.

Now, with the new multi-domain cert in place, I discovered that it does not cover the www subdomain and the non-www domain by default. My thought was to control this with redirect rules, just as I did above. However, I ran into an issue:

example.com works
example.com works www.example.com works example.com works www.example.com works example.com Shows Cert Error


I spent a lot of time modifying redirect rules to try to address this, but eventually came to believe that browser checks the certificate and shows the cert error page before the server is able to perform the redirect.

I could add more domains to my multi-domain cert to make sure it covers both the example.com and example.com for each respective domain. I have avoided this due to cost.

My question is: Do search engines care that example.com doesn't work? Will that affect search rankings for the overall domain?

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