indyank - 5:24 am on Sep 13, 2012 (gmt 0)

My gripe here is that google is focused more on punishing a website trying to manipulate its SERP's than providing accurate search results to the end user.

I don't know why it is so difficult for many on this thread to understand it. If you don't punish them, they will be happily testing every possible alternative to decode and game their algorithms. They don't want that to happen anymore.

But the side effect of this change is negative SEO will get bigger and more popular. Innocent websites of small/medium size will suffer, but they (Google) don't care about it (they cannot afford to care).However, negative SEO wouldn't work so easily against bigger websites, not just because of their established brand, popularity, spending power, "can't live without them" tag etc. but also because of their SIZE as most of their so called new "quality" and "Spam" flags are determined site wide and applied to the site as a whole.