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Google has been doing it since the start.
In their quest to provide the best and most relevant pages, Google uses very complicated formulas to figure out who links to who, what is hot, what is not, etc. Basically, a shared voting system.
Now, in order to keep it all good, they use special formulas to try to figure out when someone has their finger on the scale, so to speak, by using unnatural linking methods or is otherwise spamming to get higher rankings. When this happens, they write a filter of some sort, and redo the SERPs (commonly refered to as an update).
The problem is that each of these filters not only catches out the bad guys, but often catches out honest sites or somewhat optimized sites because your linking pattern or layout or content or something twigged one of their filters. Think of it as being the innocent victim caught in the cross fire between googlebot and black hat SEO guys.
In the rush to squeeze out splogs and bullshit, I am sure that tons of honest and real blogs get blown off all the time.
It's life, google style.
Alex
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