Shaddows - 8:53 am on Dec 4, 2012 (gmt 0)

My guess is that you don't need to worry about this unless you have already come to their attention in a negative way.

I completely agree with this, but with an important caveat.

If you are "testing" in order to push the envelope, find where the boundaries are, to really find the limits of what triggers various negative ranking mechanisms, you should obviously keep that seperate.

By extention, if you are launching something that is potentially "thin" and could conceivably be drawing negative attention, you might want to launch that under a seperate cover. Although, the time you spend "disassociating" the new site from your portfilio might be better spent creating a truly quality offering that you would be proud to include amongst your more established sites.

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I'm sure the web spam team wants to id these people, but is it truly worth the effort and the amount of data that would need to processed

Absolutely it is worth the effort.

The web is huge. Most of the web is dross, but it is not actively manipulative webspam.

Webspam is perpetrated by a relatively tiny subset of publishers. If you can identify this subset, you can save yourself a substantial amount of effort from trying to pick it up at the document level.