Webmeister - 2:14 pm on Apr 6, 2005 (gmt 0)

Google has always inferred that there is no way your competitors can harm your ranking. If getting too many links to quick can hurt someone's ranking, then we could all add our competitors to every page in several 5000-page websites and squash our competitors off of the search engines.

It will never happen. I honestly believe that most of the verbiage in this patent is old data that Google has been writing for years. Their way around too many links too quick is called "the sandbox".