Hey Guys, I am starting to notice huge changes in the serps in various (mostly affiliate markets). People doing nuke, scrapebox, srummer, and other auto-linking schemes seem to be getting slapped, but I have no hard data on how many, and how much. Some people are fine - perhaps they use these tools differently or have older sites with a stronger link profile that can handle more spam pages linking to them. But some others are getting hit. So let's post here if you have a site that's lost some ranking and what linking you were doing and we can (however anecdotely) at least see if we can see some recurring patterns. If everyone says they got slapped and they were doing X, then we can start to make some educated guesses that X may not work anymore (or is at least risky) and we can start detecting trends, and looking further into what's going on.
Hi Your PM is very interesting, but i cant reply on your pm yet (did not reach 15 posts on this forum ). PM me asap . please , with your skype id or email for easier contact . Thanks
Personally I think there are too many unknown factors to be able to accurately determine anything. I appreciate the motivation to try though but I think its pretty fruitless. For example the difference in a penalty can be as sophisticated as: Amount of incoming links Link Types Rate at which links are found Anchor text of links Rate at which certain types of similar anchor text links are found Onpage optimization Domain Age Length of onpage content Google onpage content quality score Amount of pages on website Anchor text of incoming links that relates to blog title/article title/website name Anchor texts that contain URL rather then words Amount of links found compared to how many social shares Google sees Rate of incoming links compared to other similar websites Google searchers time on site compared to other sites with same search Google searchers bounce rate compared to other sites with same search I could go on all day. Each one of these plus about a billion more can be a factor, each having its own score and each balancing and teetering the penalty meter ever so slightly.
The only sites that are immune from unnatural link penalties are those that are not related to keywords that are often abused, and sites that have extremely strong content. If you look in Google webmaster forums, the only sites that ever post questions about why they got link penalties are sites with shady themes and ones that are obviously thin content. Having an exemplary link profile doesn't immunize you from anything, only your content and theme can.
