(Entry was posted by Scott Clark on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 03/07/2019).

SSL certificate expired error

Client ABC, Inc. installed a new SSL certificate and redirected http://www.abc.com -> https://www.abc.com
http://abc.com -> https://www.abc.com
....but...
https://abc.com throws an "SSL certificate expired error." in Chrome and in SEMRush. Knowing that few humans will use this address. What are the CRAWLING and INDEXING implications for this scenario if left as-is? I am not the host or the web dev so my case needs to be made from an SEO point of view.

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Lisa Brown: https://abc.com should be redirected to https://www.abc.com also.
Since it`s resolving with an SSL error, that means traffic going there (or likely to any variation starting with https://abc.com ) may not even make it to the site. Non-technical people will bail with that warning.

As for crawling, if those URLs return a 200 status, you`ve got duplicates the same as you would have if you hadn`t done any redirects, granted it`s fewer but still. It`s also possible it`s a misconfigured hosting situation, where it`s just a default-hosting page.

Either way, I`d fix the redirects to make sure that only URLs with https://www.abc.com were 200.
Michael Martinez: If there are no links pointing to that host name I don`t think it will be a problem but I would certainly figure out what`s wrong and fix it just in case.
Paul Thompson: This is usually caused by the SSL cert not being set to cover the non-www version of the domain as well as the www version. As Michael says, not a disaster, but should be cleaned up. You never know when someone may accidentally set a valuable link using the non-canonical URL by accident.
Richard Hearne: Or possibly the wrong cert being served to non-www. Can happen quite easily.
Scott Clark: Thanks all, this is precisely the comment I sent the developer. I just wanted to understand if the search bots would "notice" this issue WITHOUT any links to the problem URL somehow. The tools such as SEMrush make loud noises about this setup.
Patrick Healy: Just curious, what was the impetus for moving from a naked domain to a www?