caveman - 5:57 am on Jan 19, 2005 (gmt 0)

While I understand the bandwagon effect here - desparate blog owners and software providers wanting to stem the tide of blogspam - it seems to me that with very little thought, a multitude of new opportunities present themselves for manipulating SE rankings.

In order to implement this with a sense of achievement and optimism, G and the other SE's would have needed already to have thought between three and thirteen steps ahead.

Black hat site operators must be drooling at this. Either that or I must be missing something.

I take it back. You need not even be black hat to see the opportunities.