Giacomo - 2:54 pm on Feb 6, 2002 (gmt 0)

ciml:

There's plenty of advice around about setting up umpteen domains to 'inflate' PageRank; how do we know that they are wrong and Paul Boutin is right? [...] Also, some country-wide accommodation sites suffer from the 'grouping' (sorry, I forget the correct term) done by domain, while some of those using a different domain for each establishment are doing much better. Also it can be easier to get umpteen listings in Web directories for umpteen different domains (one for each establishment) than for one domain (with umpteen different establishment 'sites').

Sorry Calum, but I have to disagree on that one.
A company may of course have, e.g., multiple web sites in different languages, each one on a separate domain, but that's far different from setting up a link farm or multiple domains with duplicate content IMO, and Google should be able to understand that difference pretty well. In case it doesn't and someone gets unjustly penalized, they should contact Google and explain the situation providing enough detail for them to improve their spam filters. It's that simple.