JohnRoy - 2:00 am on Jun 1, 2011 (gmt 0)

It would be easy for google to set up a fake user account, make a bunch of blog comment posts with a unique text string in them, find all the sites that are displaying that text string, and then devalue ALL links from those sites.

easy to setup?! Not so sure. imho that's NOT the way google would/should handle this.

(a) For every official (linkvana) scheme there are plenty underground ones that are hard to discover.

(b) If I would be linkvana I would reserve a fraction of the network for each customer so the other blocks are preserved.

(c) A Blog network changes all the time (if they're in business), old ones getting retired and new ones popping up. So the bad list google might compile today would loose value next month.