Spuddha - 11:09 am on Dec 5, 2011 (gmt 0)

Hi, my first time posting, tho' I'm not new to SEO. I work for an eCommerce website in the gifts niche, and over the past 2-3 weeks I've been seeing some really low quality results gaining significant ground in the SERPs. Is anyone else seeing recent examples like these?

A search this morning for <snip> finds a site suddenly ranking in position 1 that is 100% AdSense above the fold, and reports an OSE domain and page authority of just 1 out of 100. It has an exact match domain (appended with '2011' - an effect of the greater freshness being targeted?). This is the worst example I've seen in recent weeks, but by no means the only one.

Near exact match domains seem to be the common characteristic, as well as the fact they've ranked nowhere near the first page until recently, when they've jumped to a top 3 spot.

I'm also seeing a couple of sites getting into dominant positions with backlink profiles that are full of recent forum comment spam.

I'm happy that the link building we're doing is more robust and less grey-hat (guest blogging etc), but these low quality tactics are clearly working for these sites at the point it matters most. Very frustrating.

[edited by: goodroi at 7:47 pm (utc) on Dec 5, 2011]
[edit reason] Please no specifics [/edit]