Link Networks

Lower quality public networks get hit often, but private networks do also, just much less frequently. The best thing you can do for yourself if you're thinking long-term is acquiring high authority sites with good da/pa, moz metrics, and majesticseo metrics for your network. Forget about PR, it's the best thing you'll ever do.

These links will be links nobody else will ever get, they'll be extremely powerful, and you never have to worry about other people's fuck ups causing problems with your website.

You mentioned algorithm but the network was likely taken down through manual inspection.

If you think of the type of person Google hires (good degree, smart), then consider the team that person has to work with and the enormous database they have access to (gmail, google analytics, etc.), it's easy to see how even small, seemingly insignificant detail, could be a huge footprint on some PhD's terminal plugged into the google machine.