Last night at Search Engine Land, I reported Google Forgot To Renew Their SSL Certificate.
A WebmasterWorld thread reported the issue with https://www.googleadservices.com SSL certificate at noon (EST). What that meant was that from between noon time and about 8pm (EST) last night, customers who clicked from your AdWords ads might have been issued a security warning on your site. This would only happen if you used Google's conversion tracking script. But for those that did, a security warning popping up on your site, due to Google, can cause a potential buyer or prospect to quickly leave your site, even though you paid your CPC to Google for that user.
When I wrote the story, at about 4:30pm (EST), I think Google was already working on the issue. Because I was not receiving the error for the googleadservices.com SSL certificate anymore, but instead I was receiving a different error for the Google.com SSL certificate. The error was a "host name mismatch" issue, possibly Google trying to utilize the valid certificate with the expired one? I don't know but here is a screen capture:
AdWordsAdvisor at 8:20pm (EST) told the forum that he/she "just IM'd now with those same tech folks and before I could even send my second sentence, they wrote back 'resolved'." So they likely fixed it before 8pm. AdWordsAdvisor said it is now on his/her calendar for March 1st, so they remember to renew it every year. Some of these certificates have to be renewed annually, there is no way to renew for 10 years (I wish there were for all).
About a month ago, Yahoo Publisher Network also forgot to renew their SSL certificate. And I believe it took Microsoft adCenter about a a month to fix their conversion tracking script issue, which also included signs of SSL issues.
Every year I need to renew my wild card SSL certificate for my servers. I honestly start the process one month in advance because for some reason, Verisign is incredibly slow in reissuing the "wild card" versions.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
