Shaddows - 12:50 pm on Aug 23, 2012 (gmt 0)

The problem with this is that we can now be tagged as "seo bad guys" just for housekeeping our sites. They sure put you in a "damned if ya do, damned if ya don't" situation

To be fair, we're all creating a lot of FUD around that patent.

Google are not whacking you for making changes. They're just TEMPORARILY obfuscation the impact of any changes you make. If you make a change and stick with it, you will eventually be rewarded.

If you make a change soley to impact your Google rankings, Google considers you a spammer, whether you like it or not. This patent is looking to firmly identify so-defined spammers by catching them react to an unexpected Rank impact.

While not every SEO is a spammer, every (vaguely successful) spammer is an SEO. By targeting their action against SEO-maintained sites, Google is seriously reducing the number of sites they have to monitor for spam.