SSL: Will switching to a wildcard SSL cause/trigger a Google penalty?

I need to secure domain.com and www.domain.com

[bigtoga]

We currently are only securing www.domain.com. We want to also secure domain.com thus we have two choices:

1) Buy two separate SSL certificates
2) Or buy one wildcard cert

We're using a basic, "plain old" cert now - no EV, nothing fancy.

Is there the possibility of a search penalty/trust lost if we switch to a wildcard domain? We just changed servers and I'm loathe to change too much at once.

Thank you

[ssgumby]

Curious why you can't just have a redirect to always go to www. ?

[bigtoga]

Yes, that's a fair question. Let's change it from "domain.com" and "www.domain.com" to "domain.com" and "sub.domain.com" then so that the original question doesn't get changed.

[particleman]

Actually.. your situation is incredibly common and most cheap certificates cover the www and root domain. I just looked at godaddy's site and it reads..
"> 1 certificate protects www.securemywebsites.net AND securemywebsites.net"

In your case a real wildcard would be unnecessary.

[bigtoga]

I wish I could change the top post so that I referenced two subdomains instead of what I wrote (www.domain.com and sub.domain.com). I'm just trying to understand if there's going to be a search penalty/trust lost if we switch to a wildcard certificate.

[particleman]

You essentially lose nothing with a wildcard in the way of security. domain.com and *.domain.com are secured. So if for some reason you have https:// indexed urls, then that won't hurt or change anything.

[bigtoga]

Thank you for your reply. I'm not concerned about "security" - I'm worried about getting a search penalty or being put in a sandbox b/c we opted for a wildcard cert instead of a non-wildcard cert.

[particleman]

no, you won't

[jigneshgohel]

I don't think it will be problem in Google's eye if you add SSL to your domain !

[lorax]

I haven't read or seen anything that would lead me to believe there is a risk.