
Ask HN: SEO penalty for non-HTTPS if they are static sites? - mark_l_watson
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.<p>Does anyone know if these static sites without HTTPS support will rank lower in Google, Bing, and Duck-duck-go search requests?
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jakobdabo
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.

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Tomte
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.

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davewiner
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.

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LarryMade2
I think its going to be a hard sell for Google, https increases site costs a
lot for personal web.

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EJTH
Nah. You can get free SSL certs today:
[https://letsencrypt.org/](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.

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Kepler-125c
Founders:

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Mozilla Foundation

University of Michigan

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EJTH
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.

