In defense of the OP, the Google spam-punishing procedure is not purely objective or run as an unsupervised automation...it seems that Rap Genius would not have even been discovered had a blogger not made a relatively innocuous inquiry about RG's very public solicitations...which was then upvoted to the top of HN and presumably to Cutts' attention. And then after RG was reinstated, there were complaints that had it not been such a high-profile startup, the Google team would not have reinstated it so quickly (but in the defense of RG, they described and released the source code to the program they used to hunt down the bad links, which made it clear that RG handled the process in a way more efficiently than most other companies might have).

So Google's banhammer is wielded by humans with biases...that much is clear...but do we really know the order of cause-and-effect here? Perhaps this suspicious timing was an inadvertent screwup of Vivint's...that is, right after Google's acquisition of Nest, someone on Vivint's marketing team thought, "Oh shit, better step up our back-link game"...and then took it to a level that triggered a Google investigation. That chain of events could also explain the coincidental timing...and also could mean that both Cutts and Vivint's CEO are both telling the honest truth, as far as they know (not all CEOs are privy to the actual workings and details of their marketing teams)