crobb305 - 2:57 pm on Sep 10, 2012 (gmt 0)

It is an insane amount of back links over the last 2 months. If Google doesn't catch it, then the Penguin update is for not.

Yeah, like you said, even the press releases that are ranking have been gaining thousands of backlinks targeting the phrase, hundreds of links in one day in some cases. Now, 25% of the top 100 on a particular high-volume query are press releases. Google: THOSE are your spammers!