Yeah, but the perception of a conspiracy is the price you pay for handwavey/non-specific guidance about what's wrong. If your notices are not specific, then it's hard for people to know definitively whether or not they are in compliance. The flip side of that, of course, is that if you are fully specific then bad actors will exploit that in order to game the system. But that's the price you pay for ubiquity. Taking your power for granted may backfire on you if a regulatory agency or a jury decides you are not as objective as you believe yourselves to be. Intent is less important than how it manifests from the perspective of a disinterested bystander.
the disconnect probably happened because you feel that telling people through an internal tool is adequate.
Why dont you simply include these links in your notice, so that there is no ambiguity?
Regarding timing, Blekko did a neat site called http://www.spamclock.com/ that claims a million spam pages are created every hour. It's safe to assume that Google algorithmic + manual protections against spam have to operate at that scale. As Del Harvey pointed out in a recent TED talk at http://blog.ted.com/2014/03/19/how-to-keep-240-million-twitt... , "[At Twitter], a one-in-a-million chance happens 500 times a day."
And since Google operates on an even bigger scale than the volume of daily tweets, you end up with these sort of occurrences. For example, it's virtually guaranteed that some website's rankings went up today, and they happened to start using AdWords today. Likewise, it's virtually guaranteed that some website's rankings dropped today, and they happened to start using AdWords today. There's no causality there--buying AdWords doesn't help your Google ranking--but to that particular website, it might look like causality even though it's just the law of large numbers. I think the logical fallacy is called "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc"?