If Google penalises then would it not be easy for competitors to take actions against you to lose your site rakings? If that happens then the index will turn into a bun fight and Google will no longer be able to function.

Clearly there are cases where someone is caught red handed (JC Penny) but for a lot of the other situations, for example dodgy links that could have been bought by the site owner or one of their competitors, isn't it more likely that they would just be given a nil value?

An SEO contact was teling me that Google is able to take into account the IP address of such things as retweets. So, if you are running a host of different Twitter accounts from your desktop using something like Tweetadder it can tell that you're manufacturing the situation.

One of the main competitors of one of the sites I am working on is evidently doing this without it seeming to affect them. But I'm intrigued, does anyone think Google goes that far in its measurements?

Is it still alive?

I thought it had been named after Harold Pinter. So it's not a cool and intellectual britpop arty thing? Bummer.

I'm pretty sure that inbound links cannot damage your site. The worst is that they won't give you any benefit. I think the key is in your assessment that they don't appear to have done any damage.

We're pretty good at worring about the monster in the shadows in this industry. Most of the time it's just a funny shaped tree. More great metaphors coming soon...