A couple of days ago, we noticed that Google’s Search Console was displaying the following error for a new URL:
“HTTPS is invalid and might prevent it from being indexed.”
This warning appeared on a new URL that we had recently submitted using the “Inspect” feature.
A screenshot of the “Enhancements and experience” section of the affected URL.
When you click on the error in question, the following message appears as an “issue” in the Details section:
“HTTPS not evaluated.”
HTTPS not evaluated.
In plain English, this means that Google’s crawler hasn’t checked to see if the SSL certificate for your website is valid or not.
Over the next couple of months, Google will be rolling out a new HTTPS report to its Search Console. Therefore, it is likely that this new “Experience” check is a part of that.
It seems as though this particular message might be a bug on Google’s side. Either that, or they need to tweak how their crawler evaluates new URLs.
In our case, we knew for sure that our certificate was valid and that everything was fine:
- The certificate hadn’t expired.
- We had a canonical URL pointing to the correct HTTPS version.
- There were no 404 errors.
Furthermore, a newer URL immediately passed this check.
Notably, Google states the following in its help section:
“Some errors may be transient, and will self-correct after a while.”
In other words, this is probably a temporary error message that will automatically fix itself in a couple of days.
Further down, it also explains why you might be seeing the “not evaluated” warning:
“Google has never seen the URL, or has seen the URL but not crawled it yet.”
Again, this suggests that it might be a temporary issue with the crawler. If you look at the screenshot above, you will see that it had actually crawled our page two days prior.
It is worth pointing out that this new “Experience” issue doesn’t seem to prevent Google from indexing the page. In our case, our new content was still showing up in the search results.
All in all, this is probably a bug with the console itself, not your website. Therefore, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Give it a few days and it will most likely iron itself out.