Well, at least they waited until after Xmas.  On the positive side, there are a lot of companies that will spend the next month figuring out how to make their sites better for both bots and people. You can be sure that regardless of whether or not their site was hit, most site owners are having discussions about how to improve their products so they are less reliant on GOOG which can only mean better SERPs in the long run for GOOG.

It would be really cool if GOOG passed the query path in the referring URL so you can see how many/which Instant results it took to get to your site.

Ok I'll be the skeptic here - I wouldn't be surprised if the guy knew full well his consultants were buying links.

I like the idea.  As an early user of Sphinn it seemed like a great way to get new perspectives, meet other marketers, share ideas and promote my blog.  After about a year I guess Twitter began to replace Sphinn as my resource for this kind of stuff and the SPAM/gaming issues were a lot less in my face.

Seems to me the new Sphinn will be to SEL like YouMoz is to the SEOMoz blog.  That system seems to work pretty well.  Perhaps with a bit tighter integration with SEL this new model could do well and provide a lot more value to readers and authors.

Looking forward to the evolution.

Note to Rogers,MN advertisers.  Now is your chance to make some $.  Pile on the ads as you have almost no organic competition.

Thanks for the Sphinn Gypsy

Best way to go hot on Sphinn - interview 35 sphinners :)

Hmm George, curious how you define "complete"?  Not sure I have ever seen a "complete" set of predictions for anything.

Re the rubbish, which of the predictions would you say indicates the huge amount of cr-ck you think I am sm-king?

Hmm George, curious how you define "complete"?  Not sure I have ever seen a "complete" set of predictions for anything.

Re the rubbish, which of the predictions would you say indicates the huge amount of crack you think I am smoking?

Not sure where mine went.  Damn.

Some nofollow links are certainly better than others.

excellent point incredible

Hmmmm.  Interesting observation... Yahoo Flushes Millions Down The Drain

I am guessing a lot of sites just gained a bit of ranking power overnight.

Carol Bartz really proved she knows jack about search with this move.

More data coming soon guys.  thx.

Totally agree Jill.  That's why they should be called out every time they reveal their biases, even if the bias was against an evil spammer.

One notion that might get the NYT off the hook IMO is if they thought they could incur some kind of bad neighborhood penalty by linking to the spammer.

niche, it's not about should I give a link to a spammer - the withheld link was for the spammer's site, the site where the spammer wrote the fake reviews got a link.  To me it's about why did they withhold a link to the main subject of the article?

As I wrote on my blog: "A journalist deciding that they should not link to a spammer from an article about the spammer because they are “evil” and they want to deny them SEO benefits is akin to deciding not to show a photo of Kim Jong Il in an article about him because he’s batshit crazy and you don’t want to provide him with the promotion."

pearl, the issue I am pondering is not whether or not the spammers were worthy of a link, but rather that the journalist seemed to be making a judgement that they were not which seems outside the scope of reporting objectively on the news.