Now, if Google's policy was to be lenient and to "give each offender a chance," think about how they would respond to two situations:
The first situation is some unknown marketing agency that's clearly violating the rules and arranging the selling of links to inflate their PageRank or their clients' PageRanks. This would be the typical case that their policy was designed to weed out, and Google's webspam department would have no reason to be lenient. And they likely wouldn't.
The second situation is when another department at Google appears to violate the Google webspam rules. Someone from Google webspam would see that Google Chrome is in violation, and of course they would feel the need to be lenient. Sure, it's a big company, but I'm sure any employee would assume they could work things out with the Chrome department.
This would just end up being the exact situation we've seen unfold today: Google Chrome would appear to get a pass, while the "obvious spammers" would be punished normally. I don't see how "leniency and discretion" could possibly result in anything other than unequal application of Google's policies.
"While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site."
http://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pag...
http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/chrome-on...
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/internet/Google...
But the problem is the same when other companies that make an honest mistake in good faith, get punished in this manner:
1. there wasn't anything they could have done to prevent this mistake (if the Chrome team can't figure out the rules, who can??)
2. the people who end up being punished are Google's users themselves, who won't understand why they can't find BMW when searching for "bmw", and will probably think they did something wrong.
I'm not defending spammers, BTW, or even SEO (which I think is borderline evil regardless of the color of its hat).
What I'm trying to say is that Google should find a way to punish spammers without punishing its own users.
In essence, Google is admitting that they're unable to detect spam / low quality content, and therefore their "policy" is to punish the perpetrators when/if they get caught.
This may be needed to enforce the rules, but it's an obvious disservice to Google's users, who are apparently considered "collateral damage".
No, but it would be reasonable to ban the post sporting the offending link.
It also would be in the benefit of Google's users to demote pages that are content-free. I thought this was what "Panda" was all about, but I'm not sure if it's working?