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:
www.example.comexample.com
I set up IIS so that all these URLs would redirect to https://www.example.com:
www.example.comexample.comhttp://www.example.comhttp://example.comhttps://www.example.comhttps://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:
www.example.comworksexample.comworkshttp://www.example.comworkshttp://example.comworkshttps://www.example.comworkshttps://example.comShows 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 www.example.com for each respective domain. I have avoided this due to cost.
My question is: Do search engines care that https://example.com doesn't work? Will that affect search rankings for the overall domain?
