theblackout - 4:43 pm on Jan 10, 2013 (gmt 0)

"My concern is that Google may not be sufficiently intelligent enough to differentiate this"

I definitely agree with you on this - yes they are intelligent, but Google is still underdeveloped in a lot of areas.

Look at the Basic Principles for websites they endorse..

#1 Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

I would have thought the user experience on your website would be one of the most important things to Google. That does include content but it is also the user interaction.

The top two guidelines say make pages primarily for users and ask does your site help users. Most companies I know that have online marketing teams worked very hard to achieve this and arent rewarded enough..

Don't care what anyone says I can spam anchor text & still dominate Google in some verticals - check out the query 'payday loans' in the UK & have a look at the sites ranking in the top 20 and you'll see exactly what I mean.

Google still has work to do.