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Rule · HTTP and hosting

HTTPS without certificate errors or downgrades

SEO-HTTP-07C2 Recommended· w4

Class
C2 Recommended
Weight
4
Severity on fail
major
Applies to
Google

Test this rule on a live site with the canonical tag checker or the redirect checker. Free, no account needed.

Scope and evidence

Evaluated on site. The book marks this requirement DOCUMENTED RECOMMENDATION.

Never describe HTTPS as a ranking boost. That claim is not established (§6).

Fail conditions

Each condition has a stable code and a reason template. The evaluator fills the placeholders from observed values only; no sentence in a report is generated.

  • preferred_origin_http

    The site's preferred origin, {origin}, is served over HTTP. Google strongly recommends HTTPS and prefers HTTPS pages over equivalent HTTP pages as canonical.

  • certificate_invalid

    TLS validation failed for {origin}: {error}. Google warns that bad certificates and HTTPS-to-HTTP redirects can cause Google to prefer HTTP very strongly.

  • https_to_http_redirect

    {from} redirects to {to}, from HTTPS to HTTP. Google warns that HTTPS-to-HTTP redirects can cause Google to prefer HTTP very strongly.

The documented fix

Serve every host over HTTPS with a valid, auto-renewed certificate; redirect HTTP permanently to HTTPS (SEO-URL-01); remove any rule that sends HTTPS traffic to HTTP.

Sources, quoted

These are the passages the rule rests on, stored once in the knowledge base and emitted exactly as written. A citation marked for specific conditions appears only on findings with those codes.