mfishy - 4:41 pm on Jun 21, 2008 (gmt 0)

There are several things going on which really muddy the waters.

I see some sites are getting crushed by others with heavy blog/forum type backlinks. While the sites have not droppped (in fact ranked better), under manual review it would be an issue.

The other thing that is going on in highly competetive areas is folks are buying high PR links to competitors and then reporting them (obvious ones). Again, I have no idea how this all plays out...

As I have always said, the only sensible thing for google to do is to ignore links they think are not "worthy" of counting. Penalizing a site/page for inbound links is evil and I am not sure Google realizes the lengths some will go to mess with other sites (Thousands of dollars in some cases).

Of course, as tedster says, if you are a monster, like say...Google...it probably doesn't matter if you get 500,000 adult links pointed to your site or not BUT these "bullet-proof" sites are few and far between.