flicker - 12:03 am on May 26, 2005 (gmt 0)

I really think this has got to be a coincidence. I maintain a website for an organization I volunteer with and it's acquired hundreds if not thousands or stupid scraper links over the past couple of months (there are so many of them that I can no longer check the site's backlinks effectively). It still shows up #1 for both the site's name and for the anchor text used by all the scraper sites.

The scraper explosion may have happened in the same timeframe as Google's indexing problem, but that doesn't mean it caused it. If Google was penalizing sites that suddenly acquired a large number of identical and highly unnatural scraper links, this site would have been toast; but it isn't.