Could you please address my question in post #34 then please? If what you say is true, what type of safeguards are there to ensure that the information contained in the email is legitimate and not used from a competitor to sabotage a site?
If what you say is true and there are no safeguards then I could take out all my competition very easily with just a few emails...
With regard to your post (#34), I do not assume that Google is 'chomping at the bit' to remove sites from their index. On the contrary, they want as many good quality sites as they can find to inhabit their top pages. A simple email purporting a sale of backlinks would not, in itself, be enough to cause google to take action against an implicated site. But...
if a flood of actual backlinks to the implicated site was found co-inciding with the time of the surrepticious email, that might be cause enough to, at the least, discount the links.
And if more damning evidence of an actual purchase was found further linking the owner of the site to the sender of the email, well, that might be cause for an outright de-indexing of the site.
Now, I imagine that there will be some who will say, "Google would never waste time doing this sort of thing." To those persons I can only say that Google is in the business of manipulating information, and that the scenario I've layed out is not only entirely possible, but likely.
You may ask for the proof that you'll never get, just as you may speculate what really is in Google's web algorithm (which of course is
secret as well), but is the lack of available evidence reason enough to declare that such evidence doesn't exist. Apparently for some it is.