Ask HN: SEO penalty for non-HTTPS if they are static sites? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: SEO penalty for non-HTTPS if they are static sites?

I maintain several sites that change slowly in time and I have started hosting them as static sites on Google Cloud Storage (easy to do, also easy using AWS S3, and I think Azure). I set up HTTPS via a free Cloudflare service on one of them that gets fairly heavy traffic, but I thought I would leave the rest just supporting HTTP.

Does anyone know if these static sites without HTTPS support will rank lower in Google, Bing, and Duck-duck-go search requests?

View on HN

If a search engine has a rule to rank HTTPS sites higher then it really doesn't matter whether your site is static or not static.

I think there isn't really any good reason not to use HTTPS in 2016.

Getting a certificate.

Let's Encrypt only gives you certificates valid for a few months. I'm not going to be able to remember to run some script manually to renew the certificate every single time.

Not everyone is hosting on a VPS or something similar with cron jobs or the ability to open some ports and run some software.

There are also sites that were done 10 years ago, and are never going to be updated. I pay to keep them online, and they are authoritative on the events they document. But they are never going to be HTTPS sites. If Google wants to de-index them, go ahead, but then we need a new search engine that doesn't care.

I think its going to be a hard sell for Google, https increases site costs a lot for personal web.

Nah. You can get free SSL certs today: https://letsencrypt.org/

But I guess nothing is "free" wouldn't be surprised if letsencrypt has deals with three letter acronym agencies in the US.

Founders:

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Mozilla Foundation

University of Michigan

As long as they are an American 501(c) they are obligated to follow whatever directives given by the NSA. Any public disclosure of this will be handled in secret courts and they will probably be found guilty of working against the national security.

Certs may be free but you also need a static IP hosting plan and that is usually a higher cost.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com