I'm sure it has been suggested or even shouted that G has a major conflict of interest when it comes to delivering SE results. When a webmaster with good skills can extract thousands of free clicks every day there must be a strong motive from G to plug the so called traffic leak? What is the real reason behind the constant shifting and volatility with Google SERPS? Is it just trying to rid the index of spam or sqeeze more webmasters into the adsense program. If a website delivers location specific results from a large database of hundreds of thousands of pages - for example "travel" - but the results are relevant and the user gets what they are looking for then why is this spam? Because they happen to be a large site? Because they get lots of traffic? Because I don't have one myself it must be spam... Am I spam at 10 sneaky pages under the radar (I did not need the 10 pages to deliver my message but I thought I might get more traffic this way) or at say 165,000 000 up in lights like wiki. Is it spam only when you get caught? Hey I would rather see G drop the 20,000 or so pages on my site that it says exist but they actually do not exist and never have. I guess they have created their own spam for me so they can run tests on it....
If it comes back to user satisfaction then spam might be industry specific. Search "book sales Orlando" for example. You need to buy a book but it does not have to come from Orlando - some guy in Canada has an Orlando book page (as well as 300,000 other location specific pages) and great prices so as the user your happy. What if spambot x-579(just made that up) comes along and wipes this guy's site next week. Gone along with an debateable amount of "user satisfation" - the site that takes it's place is second rate and they don't deliver on time because they only have a small business so they work a day job to pay the rent, orders get lost and don't get filled yada yada ...
Meanwhile our friend in Canada who had a first class operation and 3 full time staff members has his webmaster surfing forums trying to find out if his traffic will ever come back. He might just have to start spending money on that pay per click program he had heard about once.... where is that link again....
