Personally, it's only helped me as it's knocked down a couple of truly horrible backlink spammers in my niche...but I still think Penguin is bull. I should not be able to hurt competitors, period. And for all of those that say "A good backlink profile will trump the bad links"...that may be true for Amazon and SEOmoz, but for the Barbecue Restaurant in a Pop. 20k town on the interstate, it can mean disaster. It's bad enough with all of the fake reviews going around, but add in the fact that 20 bucks can get your competitor 20k bad links compared to their 5 good ones, it's going to make a huge difference.
Search engines cannot should not operate like this. They should be moving forward instead of backward, it's simply not fair to the real businesses that try to do good. They need to focus on rewarding the good instead of punishing the bad. Heck, regardless of fairness that's just good operant conditioning technique. Anyway, there's got to be a better way...
