I have always known that google can and does.

I was with a certain person that took google to court a few years back. During the suit, hundreds of sites, suddenly went from page ranks 4 - 6 to zero.

And it pretty much did not effect anyone that was NOT connected with the suing company. After another filing because of that depute, some of the sites starting getting rank back almost immediately.

And all these sites, were white hat, plain directories. This was before the wordblack hat became common.

It was the first real hit to my income, as I was making over $1,000 a month from adsense then.

Kelvin