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brian
I thought that was a typo, but hey, who wouldn't want a half a percent boost!
It certainly is a nuisance when people out there spam whatever ecosystem you're overseeing.
No need to elevate anyone to Pantheon status. We're just people :) Andrew, the reconsideration request form in Webmaster Tools, along with details you mention in your post, is the way to go. Be up-front and we'll take a look.
It's bittersweet as it's the best company I have ever worked for and will be the best company I will have ever worked for when all is said and done.
Also, plenty of people have reasonable 5-day work weeks.
I like the whole spectrum of comments to that post, especially the responses.
This assumes you know how to edit the config file, which is not as cool as having a script do it, but the instructions here save a ton of time on subsequent wp updates:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing/Updating_WordPress_with_Subversion
The Google end-user is not represented in the article, so I'm desphinning on this major oversight. It might be convenient to call it 'you vs. Google,' but I see it as 'you vs. the Google end-user.' And if you're also a Google search user, you have to reconcile that within yourself. :)
I wouldn't be so comfortable tethering black hat techniques with general SEO. Using a cycling analogy, a cycling trainer might object when a blood doping specialist says "we're doing the same thing, we're trying to get the cyclist a win and the fans what they want." Which technically may be true, and a small subset of happy fans of the blood doping cyclist may not care. However the average fan cares about the integrity of the sport enough to support kicking blood dopers to the curb. So do the trainers who play by the rules, for that matter.
I'm not so sure I agree with the point about not being able to choose specific versions. I moved over to the Subversion method, and using svn, you can select the distribution you want to install here:
http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/
It made updating to 2.5 nearly effortless, when the instructions were followed.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing/Updating_WordPress_with_Subversion
Story: When paid posting goes wrong
Story: When paid posting goes wrong
This is a neat article with the quoted 30% churn (killing off 30% of the user profiles each month)
Story: Google: Bored at the Core
Meh. Seriously, give me a 'lame' button.
Maybe 15,000 people need to each write a blog post announcing that they are not leaving Google. ;)
Also, http://battellemedia.com/archives/001227.php
Story: Google: Bored at the Core
pcunix, we want your editorial posts/links. I'm sure if you submitted a reconsideration request we'd lift the penalty under your current changes (people on my team handle reconsiderations). However, I hope you change your mind and just add rel=nofollow to your sold links, which appear to be on the left sidebar of posts, and labeled on your home page. Of course, that's entirely up to you.
"Don't forget you're scraping the very sites you're penalizing to earn your living."
Ambiguation of the term scraping with crawling, indexing, and adding value is an SEO fan favorite in some circles, and I don't think it's too late to take the term back. I pretty much dismiss that, as it's not scraping if you're taking content with permission. Google will not crawl if a site asks us not to.
google.com has a robots.txt that asks other sites not to crawl their results. The day your garden-variety scraper site adds a robots.txt directive to block search engine crawlers is the day I very well may eat my hat. :)
Story: Who broke Sphinn?
Yes, that was an epic moment. I was at the table and was to the right of both Matts, just a simple white hat :) I eventually figured out that Matt C, my search quality compadre, was lying (he smartly used our association as a red herring). I realized it too late. Once I wised up and relayed my thoughts, the remaining black hats made quick work of me :)
I said this to many people, that it was a great icebreaker and I know a lot more people from the conference as a result. Kudos to Rand and co.
I'm not on the ads side, but I'm pretty sure that historically the ads teams work to refund clicks incurred by this kind of activity.
Maybe I'm a bit daft, but I read this and it boiled down to 1. They get around Yahoo API's access limits with web proxies and 2. the tool is going to promote stuff to help him/her make money indirectly, which is pretty much against Yahoo's API TOS.
Am I off base?
Story: How to Use Comment Sniper For a .500% Boost in Traffic