Marcia - 8:34 am on Mar 24, 2007 (gmt 0)

>>so as not encourage more lawsuits?

Future frivolous lawsuits need desparately to be discouraged.

There's a breed of people who somehow think they're entitled to high search rankings no matter what they do, and if some of them think they can bulldoze an engine into reversing a legitimate decision made based on violation of their quality standards by groundless litigation, that kind of frivolous and wasteful action needs to be heavily sanctioned.

There's NO reason whatsoever why Google has had to go through the expense of dealing with this malicious, retaliatory backlash.

Sorry, but self-righteous "Mom & Pop's" who aren't "professional SEOs" might not be aware that they're trying to manipulate like any garden-variety search engine spammer, but in reality, that doesn't make what they're doing any different. It takes less than 60 seconds to catch what kind of PR manipulation was being done, and it's still being done - which would wash out any argument of lack of intent.