Site not secure? Google confirms it will punish you with lower search rank

An interesting post appeared yesterday in the official Google Online Security and Webmaster Central blogs which confirms that in an effort to "make the Internet safer" it has been testing a system which looks at "whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms." This follows calls for HTTPS everywhere at the recent Google I/O a few months back. Google says is has seen positive results, and is now actually using HTTPS as a ranking signal albeit a "very lightweight" one which only impacts