Once you understand bad neighborhoods, you will understand that
link spamming via blog comments is not dead - but nobody on this board seems to be coughing up a whole lot of information on that topic, and for a good reason that I learned the hard way.
You will see the proliferation of bad neighborhoods rapidly escalating.
Anyone that says a platform of link building is dead (like blog comments) is working with only half of the information. What you are witnessing with your blog comments is the 5th step in the negative feedback loop of the link spam identification system that Google put into place months ago. It's actually 4 steps removed what what really is causing the problem.
Eventually this will happen to Bookmarks, Forum profile Links, Blog Farms of all sorts and really anyplace you can get a link from in a massive/dishonest manner AND THAT ALLOW IT. The sites have to intentionally allow things like this to occur. Conversely, what will speed up the process significantly is everyone using the same methodology because
all of you are creating
the same Link spam footprint. It's Google's answer to link spamming as we have been understanding it up to this point - it was an answer they developed specifically based on the problems we were causing. If you reverse engineer what link spammers do, it's pretty simple to keep your site safe and not bobbyboxed.
Oh... and it has nothing to do with "Instant".... you've got to smoke crack to think the two have anything to to with each other other than the timing of Google unlocking Instant (since it's been around since the Caffeine update, just not unlocked until now) and the real first signs of the B/N system in action and actively working against link spammers (which has also been around since Caffeine's initial release as well). To think that Instant and link tracking are directly related is a completely uneducated wild guess that is so far from correct it's scary that it was even written.
As this system develops further - expect there to be a lot more bobbyboxed sites and "WTF" posts. In addition, expect people to become much more secretive about how they link spam, because Google's only real strength is that they can sample a huge amount of data making it much easier to find spamming patterns and punishing those who don't take the proper precautions. Ergo to minimize the footprint of a single link pattern, nobody who understands what is going on will share what they personally use.
I will remind everyone that I've been making vague posts on this topic for
weeks and weeks now about not following
certain bits of advice you see out there. It's what happens when someone listen's to the first 5 minutes of a 6 hour lecture and thinks they know it all. It's greatly complicated, and will be punished much more quickly when dozens or hundreds of people take that same footprint, and replicate it on a massive scale because they didn't have the full story upfront. Welcome to the reality created by stupidity, the source of frustration
If you are going to link spam, it involves a lot more than collecting a list and clicking start - but I don't teach people about those things anymore, so my final thought for you is to begin looking for patterns, just like Google does.
Don't blame the tool if you get punished, blame the guy behind the keyboard.
