Can an Expired Security Certificate Affect Google Position?

New cert installation botched, site trashed in SERPS

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One site I do SEO for has consistently had a #1 ranking on G for its most important keyword since early '02. Today I checked it and it was trashed to #16 -- but only on one of the data centers [64.233.161.99 ] (although I did not check exhaustively). It was also trashed for some other secondary terms, but not all.

On 31 March the old security cert expired. The site's programmer had installed a new one on time, but had made some sort of error, causing users to get expired cert warnings that we just learned about this morning, at about the same time I learned of the ranking problem.

Any possibility that G is penalizing sites with invalid certs? It would make sense to do so. It harms the user experience and it indicates a site that is not being properly maintained.

Anybody have any experience with this?

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Follow up:

The security certificate was promptly fixed. Googlebot visited the site right after that. Now the data center where the ranking had been trashed is now showing the site back at #1.