smithaa02 - 3:24 pm on Sep 26, 2011 (gmt 0)

heuri...just out of curiosity what did your backlink profile look like?

How many links did you acquire in X time?

Were there super-spurts in which a lot of links were added in one day with very similar timestamps?

How many links did you have beforehand?

What percentage of the links linked to your homepage and what percentage to subpages?

% that were sitewide links? % that were boilerplate links vs contextual links?

What type of anchor text distribution did you have?

Amount of c-class and/or IP diversity of backlinks?

Amount of whois diversity of backlinks?

Name server diversity?

Google analtics diversity (did the SEO company use the same google account he edited and/or used GA for these websites)? The amount of information google has to use for counter-seo is scary. They could in theory flag any individual that searches for the term seo and run the sites they visit most often through an audit. Or...google might actually be able to figure out the IP's of users who make edits to suspect sites and create powerful profiling information.

Pagerank diversity?

Do any of google's IPs show up in your logs (manual review) with a mac browser?

Types of sites that backlinked? Page size? Age? Did they link to bad neighborhoods? Were the sites pretty natural looking to human eyes? Directory type sites? Blogs? Etc...

Any information that you could provide could supply helpful clues as to how google's penalties work.