The one issue I have with that thought (without putting much thought into it myself) is the conflict of interest. By punishing Wired, Google is saying that the only approved (by Google) income stream is through advertising (Google's main revenue stream) and that other types of creative partnerships may lead to websites being downlinked (and downranking past the 1st or 2nd page is almost equivalent to delisting).

That line of thinking also begs the question whether only freely accessible information should come up on web searches, which would rule out any links to many professional journals which survive by subscription and/or fees per article. If you're punishing Wired for putting articles behind walled garden then it makes sense to punish all walled gardens and Google search becomes a search engine cataloging only free articles.