A couple weeks ago, Google's Matt Cutts was on This Week in Google (TWiG) and on episode 227 Matt had some interesting things to say. He said that Google specifically tries to break the spirits of black hat SEOs.
At about an hour and 25 minutes into the video, Matt said:
If you want to stop spam, the most straight forward way to do it is to deny people money because they care about the money and that should be their end goal. But if you really want to stop spam, it is a little bit mean, but what you want to do, is sort of break their spirits. There are lots of Google algorithms specifically designed to frustrate spammers. Some of the things we do is give people a hint their site will drop and then a week or two later, their site actually does drop. So they get a little bit more frustrated. So hopefully, and we’ve seen this happen, people step away from the dark side and say, you know what, that was so much pain and anguish and frustration, let’s just stay on the high road from now on.
Here is the video, scroll to just before 1:25 on this video:
So in short, Google actually doesn't just look to prevent money to go to spammers, they look to break their spirits.
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