I especially like how at first he says he doesnt claim to know whether it exists or not, but then writes a complete article as if it does.
It's all a bunch of BS - overblown by a bunch of "newbie" SEOs that dont know what they are doing, and don't know how to recognize the difference between a very specific filter - which the article fails to mention since he doesnt know what the filter does - and just blaming their woes on something that sounds ominous.
The real filter exists as a filter for pre-owned domains - the real problem that Google was having with people setting up the "spam" sites was buyers of expired domains (that still had listings in DMOZ , Yahoo and others) and using the existing links to their benefit.
Google implemented a filter that is based on the age of a domain and whether it has been owned before. A domain that you have owned for the last 4 years can have a site built and avoid all of this baloney.
The other thing that Google has done, which kinda went unnoticed recently, is they became an Icann registrar with full access to the whois database of their own - this is the current way they are handling domains that are preowned - just verifying their own data.
If you have any domains that have never been linked and youve owned for some time you can prety much verify this as Googlebot is now spidering (or attempting to spider) every domain that is owned per the whois records - Ive had hits for the last two weeks to domains that havent seen a web page ever - no links, no nothing over the last 5 years and all of a sudden googlebot is finding them
of course there's no robots.txt or pages but they sure keep trying - and none of these domains ever had a site prior to me owning them.