Regardless of the feedback you got, it does look like you will achieve something for your client.  At the end of the day that's probably more important than keeping your peers happy.

Did you write a blog post in the end BTW?

I suppose I had hoped that my peers would support me and respond to Google with "yah, what's the deal here?" Rather than "how dare you publicly identify spam".

Says something about a select few in our industry. I guess that's the cost of standing up for what you believe in. No good deed goes unpunished.

Benchmarking some websites would be a good idea.

As much as we complain none of us can look in aggregate, so none of us is really qualified to benchmark how they are doing.

All IMHO of course.

…and I'd prefer to call it "benchmarking" after an announced update to measure it's effectiveness or otherwise.

I don't think that anybody we know has anything to be concerned about.

Thing is, it's not an easy concept to convey and it would take more than a 4 hour clip to dissect them all. We could spend a lot of time on clips with virtually no potential audience.

That's the problem, it's been 6 or 7 months that we last seen an update. The crappy links have been working for longer than that. So what do you tell a customer? I understand that there is a time delay that could be in place, but that long of a delay is too long.