RedCardinal - 4:02 am on May 26, 2012 (gmt 0)

@backdraft7 sorry if I offended you, but I honestly think you need to take a break if you're starting to believe that Google is somehow controlling the conversions on your site. That's not a wise-crack at all, but a very serious suggestion.

For anyone who thinks this is even slightly plausible please riddle me this. Given the computational requirements for them to track and analyse conversions on sites in real-time, then why is it that they have to run Panda and Penguin as batch jobs? Having spoken directly with Googlers who are close to this about how the process works it's fairly clear to me that the reason these run as batches is because of the time it takes to collate and analyse the data required. Now consider what they would require to do what some here are suggesting. Add to that the need to justify spend based on return?

Traffic throttling is trivial to them, and in that I am far more comfortable agreeing that it can and does happen.