potentialgeek - 12:10 pm on Apr 16, 2011 (gmt 0)

Is anyone seeing links from article sites devalued?

Article sites are de facto content farms, which have been in Google's crosshairs lately. Some of them have been hit by Panda and lost tons of traffic.

I've looked for articles I submitted to Ezine Articles, which many webmasters used to say was the best article site (and much better than its closest rival), and can no longer find them in Google SERPs. (I had steady top 10 positions for months last year.)

In another thread here started by pontifex, if memory serves, different webmasters said they'd noticed Panda has devalued anchor text in internal links.

Until recently I had #1 SERPs for several phrases which had many, naturally added (maybe once/day) internal links with the exact matching anchor text.

So I'm wondering if there has been a devaluation of both internal links within sites and external links from other sites such as article sites.

Possible developments:

1) Articles in article sites have been devalued in SERPs but links from them have the same value

2) Articles in article sites have been devalued in SERPs but links from them have less value

3) Articles in article sites have been devalued in SERPs but links from them have no value

Any thoughts on what's happened on your own sites?

Related tedster Quote (from another thread):

The site-wide demotion seems to flow backwards through the site's internal linking. This I'm still not totally certain of, but there does seem to be a pattern that says "the negative site-wide factor is strongest for pages that are just one click away from the really bad page and not as strong for pages that are more distant."

What do we call this? Generic and Relative Devaluation? Proximity Penalty?

Hasn't Google previously penalized sites which linked to "bad neighborhoods" (other sites)? Does it now apply the same principle to individual sites? Like when you link to a bad "neighborhood" (section) of your own site?