[wlesieutre]

Google used to ignore the spammy SEO links, but you can work around that by just spamming even more of them and hoping that the 1% that slip by will have a positive effect. As a result of that, Google changed their ranking system so that the spam links that do get caught have a negative effect on your rank. Which sounds like a good solution, but they have no way of confirming whether the site owner made the links or not. So now we have blackmail like this.

I assume Google is aware of this issue and has a system in place to try and prevent it, but good luck getting support if it screws up and your site falls through the cracks.

[makomk]

Google's official position is that even though they're penalizing sites for incoming links, negative SEO is impossible. So yeah - good luck getting any help from them.