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We do not see any penalties at this point.

We have a client who fired their last SEO firm for backlinking. The company has the actual emails and evidence that it found.  On July 19, 2012, they received a notice in Webmasters that "unnatural links" had been detected to their site.  The notice states that they should request reinclusion, but Matt Cutts is saying something different:

https://plus.google.com/u/3/109412257237874861202/posts/gik49G9c5LU

My client wants to ensure that they are NOT impacted, so should they notify Google anyways?

The notice in Webmasters reads:

Dear site owner or webmaster of….

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

Hi Cyrus,

No - all the content will still be visible.  We just want to migrate to https.  Thanks for the advice!

Not at all, Martin!  They just didn't answer the original question of whether or not there would be an impact.

Hmmm... of course if I could do all of those things, I probably wouldn't have asked the question. Sarcasm aside, there are tens of thousands of links external to the site, many of them on very high authority sites that will not update their links.

Are you saying that a non-SSL link to an SSL page will actually diminish the backlink's weight?

Doug

We have a client with a very large site that would like to put a login on each page; however, that would require the entire site be put behind a secure connection (changing http:// to https:// on every page).  They rank for a ton of keywords and rank well. Would the change impact their rankings at all?  Could it possibly help them?

Not at all, Martin!  They just didn't answer the original question of whether or not there would be an impact.