GoogleBowling, Myth Busted?

GoogleBowling:Sending links to your competitor’s web site from bad neighborhoods in order to harm their ranking on Google.

There has always been speculation that this works to tank a competitors site. I ran across a good Google Webmaster Groups discussion where a poster said his site he had proof his site had been hit and that was the reason his rankings tanked. There indeed were a high percentage of shady porn links from shady forums all over the place linking back to his site.

Googler John Mu entered the discussion and basically dismissed the effect of the links, blaming specifically the content on his site as being the culprit:

"Looking at the site that you mentioned, I could imagine that studying
our Google Webmaster Guidelines, in particular the quality guidelines,
would be time well spent. Most of these guidelines involve the content
on the site itself..."

No one was satisfied with that response and it sounded like John was dodging the question, but the reality is that he had pointed out directly what the issue was and completely dismissed the influence of foul backlinks, which is what is really interesting in the whole discussion. His successive responses:

"I think what the original poster is worried about is not links on his
site but rather links to his site from other (bad) sites. In theory, I
can imagine that there might be some borderline situations where that
would be possible, however in all the time I have spend diagnosing
website issues I have not once run into a situation like that."

and:

"There are a lot of factors involved and this is certainly not
something we take lightly. Google is a very data-driven company, so
you can be sure that people are looking at a lot of data about this
kind of problem. When we make adjustments because of issues brought to
our attention, they are generally on an algorithm level: we made over
400 changes last year alone. "

John comments a 4th time, basically tearing the guy's site apart, finding paid links, anti-virus issues. Ultimately the poster would have been better off not saying anything and he hasn't seen anything yet as far as a penalty goes.

GoogleBowling, myth busted? Verdict is still out, but the degree of this case (% of total backlinks that were crap) seemed like a situation which would cause concern for most webmasters and Google easily dismissed it. Though Jonh didnt claim it wasn't possible in theory, it seems like the threashold is much higher than most would have expected.