Google engineer seriously checked the AdSense HTTPS SSL issue

After I posted the problem of AdSense HTTPS SSL displaying issue, an engineer from Google AdSense contacted me. Below is the conversation. As a enthusiastic Google fan, the involvement from Google on this issue is much appreciated.

Hello,

I’m an engineer at Google, working on serving ads over HTTPS. I saw your report “No AdSense ads displayed on HTTPS SSL websites”.

Can you help me debug this at all? I wasn’t able to reproduce the problem — ads showed up just fine when I visited the sites you mentioned. Are you still seeing this problem today?

If you’re familiar with your browser’s developer tools, could you send me any more information about the problem loading? For example, can you find the URL that the browser tried to load over http? Or the URL of the ad request itself? — that will start with https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/ads?…

Thank you, I will appreciate any help you can offer me.

–Michael

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Dear Michael,

Thanks for your stepping in this issue.

I noticed it and it just lasted a short period in last week, and I found it is really strange (Your company Google is now persuading webmasters to use HTTPS SSL), that is why I checked it and captured the screenshot.

There was no problem about the adsense code I put in my website, just when the web browsers (chrome & ie & firefox on Windows 7 64 bit) try to load the https page, it says the ads were transported via http.

Another possible explanation could be the internet condition, which is an academic research network, there could be some restriction (router whatever) applied. But again, this issue is really strange. And I do not encounter this issue any more.

Next time, if I have similar issue, I will offer you more details.

I like AdSense, thank you, Google engineers.

Best,

The webmaster of www.InkSay.com

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Hello,

Thanks for your help. It turns out there are many difficulties in getting ads to work well over HTTPS, just because there are many different possible sources for our ads. As you saw, our systems for preventing any HTTP resource from being served in an HTTPS context are not yet perfect.

I’ll see if I can figure out what went wrong in the specific case you saw — thank you for the screenshot with the actual ad in it. If you see such a problem again, the most useful way to identify the actual ad that caused the problem is to grab the URL that you would get to by clicking on the ad (for example by right-clicking or Ctrl-clicking on the big arrow). But I may be able to track it down without that too.

Anyway, I’m glad the problem only lasted a short time, and thank you for the report.

–Michael