diberry - 8:34 pm on Jun 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

Maybe the more accurate definition would be “things we decided we didn’t like this week” and your site happened to be one of them update.

Unfortunately, that's pretty much exactly what he's saying here, IMO:

Matt: We look at it something designed to tackle low-quality content. It started out with Panda, and then we noticed that there was still a lot of spam and Penguin was designed to tackle that.

In that snippet, he uses "spam" and "low quality content" interchangeably, which means he sees them as the same thing. I thought spam meant "stuff that exists only to cash in on high Google rankings." But now they're including content that may exist for another purpose - such as, promoting one's business so one can sell things - but just happens to rank well.

They seem to be losing what grasp they had on the fact that all promotion is by definition an attempt to manipulate your traffic. Getting inbounds was valuable long before Google, because there was basically no other way to get seen by the 200 people who were online, LOL.

I don't think we should give up legitimate means of promoting TRAFFIC just because those means also happen to offend Google. Because there is a possibility Google actually WANTS us to stop promoting our sites so that their control over the web is complete.