lol, poor Matt, always under fire from everybody who hasn't got the rankings they want. It's simple really, Google try to make it fair for everybody (and granted it doesn't always work perfectly, which is why the continue to make changes, it's evolution) and if some sites give themselves an unfair advantage and are caught, then they're punished. How else could a search engine work? If it were any different then al of our results would be greed pages with no useful info and everybody would stop Googling stuff.
As somebody once quoted, "You can please some of the people, some of the time, but you can't please all of the people, all of the time!"