If you haven't followed the interesting case of the website Rip-Off Report, it's worth checking into. I'll give you the gist here. The discussion started with Chris Bennet, who had some interesting things to say to Google. He sums up his post like so: "Rip Off Report is spamming Google’s index, and Google is currently letting them get away with it."

Rand at SEMoz has a nice summary of the problem. According to Rand (and we're paraphrasing here):

1. Rip Off Report makes its money essentially through the extortion of businesses based on the search results (almost like a reverse reputation management campaign). Companies whose profiles appear on the site must pay the owner to have the information removed or have administrative comments added that an issue was resolved or the complaint was found to be false.
2. Rip Off Report's ability to do this is facilitated by the fact that the site ranks well at Google, in a way that violates Google's Terms of Service.

Excerpt from Paul Pope's The One Trick Rip-Off

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