This is a long one.
From that thread it seems this problem has gone on a long time. One of my sites was a victim of this in December. Hell, I wasn’t even trying to target anything competitive. What happened was at first I lost some of my rankings for these non-competitive phrases to the site that was linking to me through a redirect/click counter. (I didn’t link to them) Their link replaced my previous rankings in the SERPS with my title, description, & some text from my home page. It still redirected to my site when you clicked on it but Google hit me with a duplicate content penalty and threw every one of my phrases to the bottom. (Gbot decided my page was new and copying off the hijacker.) Almost 3 months later my previous SERPS are still stuck there. The offending site also has finally lost their rankings.
Does that help me though? No. Even though my site’s pages are still indexed & get crawled every day, for all intents & purposes, I may as well not be because of the penalty. Oh, and I wrote the owner of that site way back, explained the problem, and asked that he remove the link but got no reply. The link is still there. So imo he was aware of what he was doing – it was intentional. This guy’s site has hundreds if not thousands of links on it in this form.
And the suggestion from “googleguy” in those threads at WMW to write Google with examples and put “canonicalpage” in the subject so it gets to the engineers must be some sort of joke. Many have said they’ve done this. I tried to do it and the email he suggested we send them to wrote back (canned) for me to fill out G’s online form. I went there and you can’t write anything more than 1,000 characters. So forget trying to even explain this to them. And I’m pretty sure Mr. G Engineer with his millions in stock options is worried about by gambling site anway.
AFAIC all of these so called SEO experts and “googleguy” are scams. If the SEO people were the experts they claim to be why are they pissing around on message boards giving everyone advice with the hope someone will hire them. They should be out there getting #1 for Viagara or whatever and sitting on some island with drink in hand. And if they have those type of rankings why would they tell everybody else how to compete with them? I don’t believe that guy works for G. Seriously, why does every so-called “SEO Expert” run a message board or newsletter? Well, my basic common sense tells me that is where they make their money. Not because of their search engine expertise.
And another thing, does anyone notice how all of the SEO boards push submitting your sites to directories to help your rankings? Funny that some of the same directories are owned by well known SEO types. And even funnier, that some of the directories use the same type of click counters/redirects that can hijack newer sites. I don’t think it will be long before they figure out a way to get older sites in this manner, if they haven’t done it already. My advice is not to ever submit to any directory other than maybe DMOZ. I’ve got one directory listing that appears visually as a static link but is having the same effect on this same site of mine. It’s a popular one on the search engine/webmaster message boards. They all say this is a great directory to get into. Yes. It costs money too 
Now the gbot loves this particular site that was targeted and thoroughly crawls it every day but it doesn’t change anything. So what is my plan? Do something I should have done a long time ago that someone on this board told me to do, and forget about G. By the end of this month I will ban their bots from all of my sites. I don’t have enough traffic anyway from them yet to consider this a loss. The bottom line is why create new content so these scumbags lying in wait can steal the rankings that result? Yahoo doesn’t have this problem with redirects. Apparently G wants a future results page that is nothing but millions of directories. In fact, I’m thinking about creating one just for this purpose. It will be my one G site.
Go MSN & Y. Screw G and all of these SEO experts kissing their ass.