Update 10/24 – This morning there’s a warning. It comes up when you begin filling out the form. It’s small, but it’s there. Was it there when I wrote this? I don’t know, but it’s definitely there now, so this post is irrelevant.
I don’t know about you, but I put a lot of effort into making sure that our client sites were SSL. I mean, how stupid would it look if we’ve known that this change was supposedly coming for over a year now, and we had just ignored it?
And it wasn’t just SEO clients we were concerned with… we host websites too. I took great pains to make sure that we had SSL installed and functional for well over 400 domains this summer. In fact we moved 100+ domains to different hosting servers back in April because they weren’t going to be able to support us with easy SSL at all.
Not only me, but people all over the internet marketing and security industry have been writing about how important this was, because we expected something significant to happen.
Chrome 62 is Out and the Sky Didn’t Fall
Sometime over the weekend, or perhaps just this morning, my Google chrome was updated, and guess what? I see no new warning for non-SSL sites that have sensitive form fields.
If you actually click on the informational ‘I” then it does pop up with a message that the site is not secure, but that’s nothing new.
Here’s a screenshot of a closed business site I left insecure, just to see what the warning would actually look like:
As you can see, there’s no warning showing in the browser tab address field, despite the fact that an email field is present. Grrr. I really wanted to see Google follow through, and throw up a warning. It’s not like everyone was just speculating – this was an official Google announcement.
Of course, with the failure of Mobilegeddon to have the significant impact that Google said it would, (in fact mobile first indexing is just coming along now) what made me think this *big warning* would be any different?
Does this mean that going SSL was a waste of time?
No, of course not. Just like having a mobile friendly site, it’s still the right thing to do. It’s just that (apparently) it wasn’t quite as urgent as we were led to believe. Perhaps, after it’s been out for a while they’ll add the warning like Bill Hartzer noticed Google did with the beta version, but I’m not gonna bet on it.
You know, if I didn’t know better, I might wonder if this misinformation campaign by Google is just a conspiracy to discredit SEOs?
