Danny Sullivan on Googlebowling:

My feeling has been mainly that good sites will escape such a thing, if it really did happen, because it wouldn’t be normal. Say you believe in “googlebowling” and tried to do it to SEW, for example. Well we’ve got hundred of quality link pointing at us, good historic links. I feel like that’s going to outweigh any sabotage attempt. But a small site with no link normality. Perhaps.

The SearchEngineWatch thread was really about the seemingly insane PageRank values being given these days to homepage and internal pages. But I had to point the gem by Danny above. Call me obsessive compulsive, but for any link building campaigns I do, the concept of quality linking especially at the beginning of the campaign is of paramount importance. When a new site is released into the wild, having a platoon of quality links (or quality domains to 301 hehe) will help protect against the horde of links from spammy, untrusted sites.