Hissingsid - 9:51 pm on Apr 8, 2008 (gmt 0)

They just have to ignore stuff, I don't see how penalising equates to better spam control? If they ignore all the practices black-hats get involved in then those sites won't rank. Why have penalties?

Well said!

Google's founding spin that one link is one vote is difficult for them to leave behind. What they are now doing is shooting the president because the wrong people voted for him.

Rather than a link being a vote I think it should be seen as the transfer of a token (funds) to a bank of goodwill. With the amount transferred being on a scale of 0 to 10. Links from dodgy sites and sitewide backlinks etc each are worth exactly 0 and therefore have no value. A link from an authoritative ultimate trust site from a page that is exactly on theme is worth 10. This is called PageBank and is one element in the ranking algorithm.

Cheers

Sid