Google: Penguin is now part of our core algorithm

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Jim Munro: This is not a Penguin Update. This is a fresh approach to an age-old problem.
  
  Penguin was fundamentally flawed in that it allowed actions of a competitor to take down an entire site. Google has known for many years that innocent websites were being wrongly penalised.
  
  If I am comprehending what they are saying correctly, now it will be almost impossible for the actions of a competitor to ruin someone else's site. This is a complete about-face by Google and good on them for finally trying to do the right thing.
• 
  Federico Sasso: My understanding is negative SEO is still possible.
  Good news is demoted sites will not need to wait ages to be re-evaluated after cleaning the mess (or disavowing it). It also means "churn and burn" spammers will have harder times getting results.
• 
  Jim Munro: Fair enough, +Federico Sasso, you would know better than I do but would you mind sharing some attack 'vector' examples still possible for discussion on Thursday? Am I right in assuming that they are now evaluating on a page by page basis and not accumulating counters? Do you think their new method is to discount or not count extreme values as Bing has always done?
• 
  Federico Sasso: +Jim Munro ;The "more granular" statement is a little ambiguous in my opinion; if not on a page basis, could be for site sections.
  I have no insights, of course, on how they evaluate outlier values. Looks to me they didn't simply mention anything about that in the linked post. I think we should assume nothing changed on that (unless I missed something).
• 
  Jim Munro: ...and I thought I was a hard and cynical man, +Federico Sasso. :)
  
  ...but would they have expended all those resources to change their method for no benefit? I am stupid enough to imagine that they have learned from the way Bing approaches this issue or at least that is what I have given them credit for.
  
  Time will tell, I guess.