Marketing_Guy - 8:36 am on May 7, 2012 (gmt 0)

+1 Planet13.

The problem is if they do beat the bushes enough and scare people into giving their data, then they could have enough to footprint a lot of link building activities which could impact the rest of the industry in the future.

The whole situation reeks of a parent telling their child they "know" they've done something wrong and keeping quiet until the child panics and admits it.

That said, I reckon most of the buzz and blog posts on the subject recently are less about people being manipulated by Google behind the scenes and more about people jumping on the bandwagon for a popular topic.

I've got sites which received natural site wide links years ago - can't wait till Google decides those are evil...