Tired of Speculations - An interesting thread in WMW discusses speculation in SEO,

There is a recent thread in Webmasterworld.com where a guy mentions he is highly frustrated on speculations, People have been speculating on Google sandbox theories, Death of large sites, Large movement in SERPs, OOP( Over Optimization Penalty ) , Banning of affiliate sites etc, Some times these activities are kind of frustrating and that is what he mean to say in his post,

This is the post of that Member:

For over a year, I've been reading all kinds of speculations and strange theories. "Google doesn't like this, Google doesn't like that..." and there you go. A vast percentage of threads are started by somebody that had dropped three positions at Google serps and starts a theory out of thin air. There are no proofs (read it: Official from Google) about sandboxing, AWS or affiliate sites, AdWords publishers not ranking high, sites wiped out for over optimization, large sites not being "liked" by Google, and the list goes on. Why are so many webmasters so fond of these theories? Isn't that some kind of "over analysis"? Of course I do some analysis myself, and also I understand that Google changes its algorithm and makes it confusing to follow, but the basic rules haven't changed: Build a good site, get some relevant links and don't behave bad with any search engine. Spend more time looking for all the traffic opportunities that you have in the web. A good link from a good web site is a mine of gold. And it is not that difficult. I'm not telling you to forget about Page Rank, or exchanging links or deep analyzing. That's good. But if things change, don't start blaming on Google and do first some research around. Your competition is working as hard as you do. You are not alone. How can you start a project believing that Google doesn't like big sites? Tell that to the Encyclopedia Brittanica... Or Microsoft, or Slashdot, or Sitepoint, or Adobe, or About.com, or... It is not my intention to be flamed, but stop and think about this for a minute.
It is an interesting read, To visit the forum discussion copy and paste this URL:
webmasterworld.com/forum3/25618.htm