Quite understandable that they don’t want their search engine leveraged to persecute or smear people, and to limit the ability of just a few folx to subvert their system to do so. Quite another thing entirely if you have a whole lot of unrelated users who want to link into a site/page using a particular term to express their opinions.

If Google’s method is only reducing the ability for a small number of people to easily compromise keyword relevance, I think it’s okay. But, if this method would also limit the expression of an opinion shared by many people’s links, then I think it’s clearly gone too far and doesn’t make sense.

There have been several posts by SearchEnginesWeb over the past year, insisting that some SERPs automation be tried that would NEUTRALIZE certain black-hat SEO tactics.

Their Algos bring to their attention, sites suspected of violating Webmaster guidelines – they then verify – and either WARN or Ban.

They use to just instantly ban the entire domain - however – amazingly – SearchEnginesWeb convinced them to be less extreme & more humane.

The new anti-GoogleBombing algos may hurt innocent sites, especially those that are new with new backlinks or comon baclink ancor text or backlinks with low PR and low TrustRank.

This was more of a Public Relations initiative because of the major election and the political tactics that may grow.
Perhaps, even Bush’s camp may have contacted Google.

But, if in fact innocent are demoted and suffer, it will be unforgivable. It is getting increasingly harder for them to get any rankings on Google – sooner of later, it will be virtually impossible if these trends continue.

At

All best, Paul
http://paullevinson.blogspot.com