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More thoughts?
Not necessarily. Take a look at the bottom of Jakob Nielsen's bio page. If someone on Google's technical advisory council can get away with it then so can all of us. ;)
dwilson, it isn't just several threads. There are multiple dozens of threads where this topic has been discussed. Over and over and over and over...
There can never be any conclusions drawn; all we have to go by is what the search engines have published as their guidelines and statements they've made at conferences - where there's also ambiguity and possibility of change. All anyone can do is offer conjecture and opinions to the best of their ability, which can depend on which side of the fence they're on and what their personal motivational triggers are.
Some folks are righteously indignant because they're being beaten by what may or may not actually be spam, while others get irritated, indignant and resentful of the self-righteous attitudes of others.
It's yet to be constructive or definitive. It can never be, because the search engines will not tell anything beyond what they already have - and they shouldn't. Those who have been caught spamming are unlikely to share what it was that got them busted, being unwilling to divulge their tactics or "trade secrets."
The best thing we can do if we want to know what's safe for us is think of whether what we're doing would be OK if someone from a search engine were looking over our shoulder and examining our work and our motives.
The other is to go through the site search and read the dozens of not hundreds of threads containing multiple thousands of posts and opinions on the topic that can be found in the site search:
All we can do is take what we like and leave the rest, and make our own decisions based on our own common sense and conscience.
