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by bmelton 3875 days ago
Does Google still penalize short-term / soon-expiring SSL certs in search rankings?

Edit: this does not appear to be a thing that happens.

2 comments

I would assume not, given that https://letsencrypt.org/2015/11/09/why-90-days.html cites "According to Firefox Telemetry, 29% of TLS transactions use ninety-day certificates. That’s more than any other lifetime."
Why do you think that's a thing that's happening?
Hrm. Good point. At some point I remember some SEO guru or other claiming that long-duration domain name registrations were good for SEO, but looking at it now, it seems as though that was a correlation !== causation, as MS, Goog, et al register their domain names for decades at a time, and also tend to have high search rankings.

As for the rest, chalk it up to my over-active imagination, compounded with that bad knowledge. SSL is an SEO boost (according to a random Googling), and if domain name expiration was a factor, it made sense to me that SSL expiry would factor too.

TLDR, I was a dumb.