Indexing of HTTPS for HTTP site?

elcappy

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So I have a customer who complained about some non secure message that his customers have been telling him about. I checked out his site and turns out for some reason Google indexed his homepage as HTTPS even though he doesn't have an SSL cert installed, nor can he install one with the current system that he uses (about a month to go on that project).

Is there any way to remove the homepage from being indexed as HTTPS? Has anyone else encountered this same issue? I did a site search on Google and all other pages are indexed as HTTP, but not the homepage.
 
If his customers are getting an SSL error message then he does have a cert installed. It's just probably a locally generated cert. It is impossible for a customer to get an SSL error message unless there is an https server running. It's easy to install a proper cert. There's many that are cheap and even some that are free.

I just looked and there's a dozen sites like https://www.sslforfree.com/ which would probably take that error away.
 
like previously said its impossible to get an SSL error if no SSL is running. there is likely a default cert. just check by going to the IP directly on port 443 for example http://1.2.3.4:443 ..if you get a response, SSL is running.
also view the cert to get more details then you might get a clue where its from i.e. cpanel or something.
 
Interesting answers above. To answer your indexing issue, try to 301 redirect https to http with .htaccess (plenty of tutorials around) and make sure the canonical tag is used properly, if at all.
 
Yeah looks like we're going to force https -> http while we get the SSL system working. We have hundreds of customers on this system and this system doesn't have cpanel or anything fancy to install SSL certificates per domain so it's going to require some programming to get that going.
 
you don't need any programming to install SSL certs even without cpanel. i never use cpanel, i just SSH in to the server then install the certs manually.
there are many howto's for that, its really easy :) just do a google search.
 
you don't need any programming to install SSL certs even without cpanel. i never use cpanel, i just SSH in to the server then install the certs manually.
there are many howto's for that, its really easy :) just do a google search.
Yeah I've installed plenty of SSL certs before and it's no biggie, but we have a custom platform on some Azure servers with IIS and I've gone over it with our dev team plenty of times and it's obviously not impossible, but with our current setup, it's just a hassle to do. So we're trying to build a simple way to facilitate this process. Once we have it down, we could theoretically have about 300+ SSL certificates to install and doing that manually 1 by 1 is going to be time consuming, hence why we need the programming to make it easy.

That's why for now I have to just stick with the 301 redirect to try and fix this issue.
 
i see well i'm a unix guy so no idea about IIS sorry, but i'm sure there are already existing solutions to deploy many certs at once, especially on windows. might be worth to check on google.
 
So I have a customer who complained about some non secure message that his customers have been telling him about. I checked out his site and turns out for some reason Google indexed his homepage as HTTPS even though he doesn't have an SSL cert installed, nor can he install one with the current system that he uses (about a month to go on that project).

Is there any way to remove the homepage from being indexed as HTTPS? Has anyone else encountered this same issue? I did a site search on Google and all other pages are indexed as HTTP, but not the homepage.

To stop homepage from being indexed as HTTPs, there is only one way 'redirect home page url from https to https using 301 redirect'.
 
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