Google Bowled

Was reading about this trick today.

Assumption: Google can penalise a site upon the quality of its inbound links.
you site is judged upon who is linking to - if you have got only spam sites referring to your site, a search engine will figure out that your site is a spam one.

But if you have got quality links, you are not going to be penalised for them - I have never seen that hapening anyway.

Issue
If you assume that the assmption is true, you can start thinking: well, I have just to buy nasty links and point them to my competitor to get him banned.

If your competitor hasn't got any good link, it's true, you'll get him banned. but instead of spending your resources on buying the nasty links, why don't you use them to build good links to yourself? If you can get him banned, it simply means that you can easily take him on his linking strategy

Advice from the poster.
Google should not penalise for income links, but just reduce to null the wight of outbound links from spam websites.

That's what it does already. The weight of a link is calculated according the quality of the link.

Conclusion: I don't think that "google bowling" is a real issue - but I may be wrong - and happy to check that out if someone can give me a real example of site concerned by this issue.