MHes - 7:23 am on May 25, 2004 (gmt 0)

Brett - I don't understand your comment at all.
None of your examples are "over optimisation" ........

"- misleading cloaking." - Thats just plain pointless
"- autogenerated content. " - Can be good, can be bad, but other factors will determine if it is over optimised or not.
- redirect games - This is not over optimisation, its just bad optimisation.
- lovely 3rd level domain playing with wildcard dns. - Too complicated for "over optimisation".
- link pages for the sole purpose of pr. " - Thats what link pages are for, lets not pretend otherwise!

IMHO "over-optimisation" are tactics that are good and fair, but done in an unnatural way which demonstrates an awareness of what the algo may be looking for. If Google sees too much emphasis on a keyword phrase, via a combination of h1, anchor, bold, title etc. it will assume the webmaster is trying to get an advantage, not via pure content but via code manipulation, and google appear to (in some sectors) ignore this code.

In short:
Over optimisation = Google has sensed you are algo aware.