> If it was an SEO tactic put forth by an SEO firm to find sites that
> accept links with any anchor text and deep links that are not reviewed
> such as the ones John mentioned:

> http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&rls=GGGL%2CGGGL%3...

> This may be a strong indication by Google to be as forthright as
> possible about that, it also may be a strong indication that Google
> may see some other questionable practices that took place and now
> would be the time to mention them in the request.  Our tools are
> limited, and they can go over old caches and history that none of us
> on the outside have access to.

> I'm hoping that this doesn't cause a storm of people now worried about
> some shady seo linking to them in a spammy way to hurt their
> rankings.  From what I gather from this thread is that once a site has
> been flagged and penalized that all of the details including on site
> and off site factors get looked at very closely, much closer than
> before.  Remember that Google has a copy of every page on the web that
> they've crawled and can quickly pull up any relationships between
> them.  So if on 10/16/07 thirty seven links start appearing with the
> anchor text "Dining Room Furniture" to a product page on sites that
> don't monitor their commenter's links, they'll be able to notice it.
> On it's own this may be ignored as it is generally accepted that
> external sites cannot hurt your ranking (though that has been removed
> from Googles documentation) but when coupled with other signals it may
> add up to something.   I would imagine that it also has to be weighed
> as fraction of the whole of the links.  In other words, if a site has
> 36,000 links to it and 34,000 links are from theme sponsorships, 1,000
> are from keyword rich blog comments, 500 are from web directories, and
> only 10 are from actual sites giving out an editorial link that would
> be a pretty good sign that someone was trying to improve their ranking
> by external methods.  If 99% of the links are questionable, then it
> may give them cause to not only devalue them but devalue the site as a
> whole as well.  It's like the interlinking of commonly owned sites
> problem, or domain farming as its often called.  For legitimate sites
> like Google, youtube, and blogger, some interlinking is possible, but
> only because if you look at the millions of links they have, only a
> very small percentage are from their own properites.  Where it gets a
> site into trouble is when the majority of its links are from a common
> individual that a ranking penalty would make sense.  I'm only guessing
> here and have absolutely no inside knowledge, just trying to talk it
> out.

> On Feb 26, 4:50 pm, JohnMu wrote:

> > I think that's a great start, ShyBoy.

> > Similar to how you have removed spammy links in your own forum, you
> > may want to consider what you can do to help clean up similar links on
> > other people's sites. Blogs and newspaper sites such ashttp://media.www.dailypennsylvanian.comsometimesreceive short
> > comments such as "dont agree", apparently only for a link back to a
> > site. These comments often use keywords from that site instead of a
> > user name, perhaps "tree bench" for a furniture site or "sexy shoes"
> > for a footwear site. If this kind of behavior might have taken place
> > for your site, you may want to work on rectifying it and include some
> > information on it in your reconsideration request. Given your
> > situation, the person considering your reconsideration request might
> > be curious about links like that, so the more you can explain about
> > that, that may help as well.

> > John