Google Was Failing to Crawl My Site — Because My SSL Didn’t Cover www

Adam C. | 5 months ago

For nearly three years, SwimStandards.com has quietly had a problem that I didn’t realize until recently: Googlebot was failing to crawl www.swimstandards.com due to an SSL error.

I always assumed everything was working fine because:

I only use https://swimstandards.com

Google Search Console didn’t report any errors for the root domain

I never intentionally promoted the www version

But last week, I finally looked into a persistent “High fail rate” warning from Google Search Console — and I found the root cause.

What Happened?

When I first set up SSL using Let's Encrypt, I only issued a certificate for:

swimstandards.com

I didn’t realize that www.swimstandards.com was not included — and that matters.

Googlebot (and some users) occasionally try the www version. Since the SSL certificate didn’t cover it, requests to https://www.swimstandards.com failed with a certificate mismatch, leading to crawl failures and potentially missed indexing.

The Fix (Finally)

I reissued the SSL certificate using Certbot with both domains:

sudo certbot --apache -d swimstandards.com -d www.swimstandards.com

This updated the certificate to include both:

DNS:swimstandards.com
DNS:www.swimstandards.com

I also added a redirect so that any requests to www.swimstandards.com get properly forwarded to the canonical root domain:

https://swimstandards.com

Did This Affect SEO?

Honestly — probably not much, but it's possible:

Google favors a consistent, canonical domain structure.

Failing SSL on www might have prevented some backlinks from being credited correctly.

Googlebot crawl errors, even if minor, aren’t ideal over a long period.

If there was any SEO impact, it was likely small, but avoidable.

Lesson Learned

If you're running a site:

Always include both domain.com and www.domain.com when issuing your SSL certificate.

Always set up proper redirects from the non-canonical domain.

Use tools like curl, openssl, and SSL Labs to test both versions.

Check Search Console regularly — even warnings you think don’t matter.

TL;DR

For 3 years, https://www.swimstandards.com was broken due to an SSL oversight. I fixed it in 10 minutes — and I wish I had done it sooner.