[FreeAtlanta]

Nothing from Google surprises me. They have fantastic software and engineers, but unfortunately, they mix politics with their business. I wonder how they would feel, when their staff gets Unionized under new Democrat legislation?

[underground]

Half the sites listed are suffering from duplicate content penalties and weak backlink profiles.

However, the other half don’t look like they should have been penalized at all.

Blogger’s systems are automated and the sites have all been reinstated, so I’m guessing that some Obama fan-site put links to them because the “flag blog” button is an easy way to shut someone down. Technically, the same could probably be accomplished (temporarily) if a group of people went around targetting pro-Obama sites.

If enough organized Obama supporters clicked that in a short enough amount of time, they would trigger a blog lockdown until manual review could be done.

Anyway, this is why I advise against using free hosting for primary sites. Shared hosting only costs $6-$8 a month and you have a contractual claim to your data and site access. With free hosting, you have to just take what they give you...

[wbill]

My $0.02? Google is a private company, and can do whatever they want to.

But, articles like this are an excellent sunlight to get rid of the cockroaches. Pretty hard to run a business when you go out of your way to pi$$ off 50% of your clientele.

[B Knotts]

I've pretty much stopped using Google, and have switched to:

Cuil