Hi All
I had a chat with a domain provider who told me that LE certs would be marked down or potentially not accepted by google which would hurt traffic to my site.
I am setting up a small business website and believe I must setup SSL on the site.
Is this true or is this a sales technique just to sell SSL certs?
Your feedback would be great
Thank you
Hi @KrisAU
that's wrong (friendly spoken, not friendly spoken - oh, I don't want to write that 
).
Google prefers https, only a valide certificate is required.
And since Letsencrypt startet, there are much more sites secure.
But the conclusion: Making money with certificates is dead. OV- and EV-certificates will follow, because browsers (upps, Chrome from Google) reduce the place to show these informations.
They just want to steal your money. There's no truth to their statements.
Thank you gents, I figured this was the case.
I assume this is a good site to start with to protect my site with a LE cert? I have a website made using Word Press
You need to speak to a "better" one...
[that one isn't looking out for YOUR interests]
Well seems like they lock you in
GoDaddy doesnt support LE, which means manual every 90 days. Not really an option 
I agree that there’s no good reason to believe the domain provider here. On the other hand, Google’s ranking algorithms are secret and involve many different factors. It’s not impossible that Google could, for example, estimate the cost of the hosting infrastructure that particular sites are using, and rank more expensive sites higher than cheaper sites (or more plausibly, rank things that more professional or sophisticated sites usually do higher).
Anti-spam systems sometimes do something like this, and Google is surely more sophisticated than they are.
Google hasn’t made any statement about this, and so the domain provider’s claim is probably speculative (and spurious). What we’ve heard from Google is that sites with HTTPS will be ranked higher than sites with only HTTP, and Google didn’t indicate that the certificate authority mattered in this ranking.
Since Google is always adjusting its secret ranking algorithms, it may not be a good idea in the long term to believe someone who has a financial incentive in selling you something that’s supposedly good for SEO. (They may not know whether what they say is true, and can’t guarantee it will remain true!) But that doesn’t mean that the claim is impossible.
Edit: I should emphasize that although search engines might theoretically decide to consider more-expensively-hosted sites more authoritative, I don’t have any evidence that Google is currently doing this and I don’t think that certificate resellers or hosters have any evidence either.
Google use Let’s Encrypt for their own Firebase hosting service - it would be ludicrous for them to behave in the way suggested. That’s on top of being platinum sponsors of Let’s Encrypt.
It's true that Google is very supportive of Let's Encrypt in many ways, and it's definitely not as though they think it's a bad thing. However, I'm sure that their search ranking team has quite a lot of autonomy in defining what kinds of signals are used and how they count for ranking purposes, and I don't think it's impossible that they could effectively decide that more expensive infrastructure is a positive signal in some circumstances.
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