Ok, I do have to weigh in on the recent google banning of the former PR8 heavywight
www.smashingthumbs.com. I used to trade links with the webmaster of smashingthumbs. All and all, it was a good site – a work of adult webmaster SEO genius in my opinion.
Problem here is the guy got overly aggressive in his linking and use of borderline doorways pages. The guy was ranking for all kinds of terms on Google and I strongly suspect that the majority of spam complaints came from webmasters that we jealous of smashingthumbs success.
On the other hand, it wouldn’t matter if smashingthumbs was coming up for every term under the sun just as long as when Google hand screened it there was good content in the results. Unfortunately for ST there was not.
Even though he was a major competitor – it is sad to see it happen, I have a feeling that rival webmasters helped shovel the grave, and the main reason he went down is webmaster running it just got too damn greedy.
That my 2 cents.
Also on the recent banned list:
http://www.********.com