dataguy - 5:56 pm on Nov 2, 2006 (gmt 0)

dataguy - interesting comments there. It seems to imply that purchased links may not only be ignored, they might even be penalized. Or perhaps the power of links you once benefited from is now removed through some false positive for purchased links?

Yeah, and what is particularly stinging is the fact that right after it was inferred that I was 'buying or selling links to manipulate PageRank' Matt Cutts comes out and brags about how good they have gotten at determining bought links. Yippee for them, they might be pretty good at it but they obviously aren't right 100% of the time.

For the record, this site tanked during the Sept. 15th data push, so whatever data they use to flag bad links can be found in those data pushes. It doesn't seem like they notify webmasters of penalties from those data pushes, but rather when there is a manual penalty webmasters are more likely to be notified.