europeforvisitors - 2:17 pm on Oct 15, 2006 (gmt 0)

Basically, if it was intended to be fair, they would then go and manually check all the other 30 sites and, to be sure, at the very least 25 in my segment would have gotten the same penalty which would have moved me up to #5 spot. But they will never do that ‘cause they’ll never have enough human reviewers for that.

You don't know that it was a manual penalty, because--if there was a penalty--it could have been the result of multiple factors that just happened to trigger an automated penalizer. Maybe you were doing X, Y, and Z, while the other guys were doing only X and Y, Y and Z, or X and Z. Only Google knows.

But even if the penalty were applied by hand, so what? What does "being fair" have to do with anything? Google isn't refereeing a football game; it's trying to discourage behavior that has a negative influence on its search results. All it needs to do is penalize enough offenders to make the others reconsider their behavior. Think of a Google penalty as the equivalent of a traffic ticket: When drivers on the highway see a car pulled over, they tend to slow down (at least until the cop is out of sight).

One can argue that, if Google is playing traffic cop, the strategy isn't working. After all, Webmasters are still spamming, just as drivers are still speeding. But the situation won't be improved by eliminating penalties until such time as all offenders can be caught--just as speeding won't be stopped by taking cops off the street until all speeders can be caught.