Gloating? That's funny... but they've been at this for years, and I already had an "unnatural links" message before any splog network peddlers had a chance to get mad at me for talking to Matt. I mostly tweeted at him about that to check for a pulse, since my "WTF" questions (as above) have been getting ignored for so long.

I have no sympathy for the people who have been lying to small business owners for years ("Google loves our links but even though they love it, it's also totally undetectable - buy now!") - this is entirely about the victims of the splog networks. Who are legion.

The only reason I am bothering to post anything here now, is to try to get some answers for everyone on whether Google has decided to open up the market for "negative SEO." Still looks like they haven't, but I also think they owe every webmaster an answer. Once I see how this all plays out, I expect to be "Google proofing" these particular sites with robots.txt.