irishsolar - 2:39 pm on Apr 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

There are not only weak sites that have come out of nowhere to land high in the SERPs but on one competitive "how to" keyword an extremely weak affiliate site that was first registered on 01/26/2012 is holding a prominent position on page 1.

The number 2 spot is held by another weak affiliate site with no new content added since Nov. 2011 and which has only 136 backlinks.

And guess what? Most of those links are coming from clearly identifiable blog network posts!

Anyone else seeing this type of thing for their keywords?

It is obvious to me that this has something to do with the type of backlinks being built and nothing at all to do with on-page.

I mentioned before in the continuation of this thread (now moved back here) that sites which were relying heavily on spammy blog comments had rose to the top and I thought they would get zapped and that is exactly what I have seen happen in my niches in the last day or two.

Now I think they are doing the same with blog network type links.

These current results must be temporary. I am predicting another round of site zapping!

Taking out BMR and ALN manually was just the start. These recent upheavals are algorithmic and designed to hit sites that are using tried-and-tested SEO methods.

I believe this is the over-optimization penalties Matt Cutts referred to.

I have seen my site go from position 3 to being completely taken out of the SERPs for this "how to" keyword, then re-enter again only to disappear once more. Yesterday it re-entered yet again but this time way down the SERPs on page 10. It quickly rose to the top of page 7 within a few hours them promptly vanished again.

I think everyone should stop panicking and wait until the dust settles to see what real damage has been done.

However, I would be interested in knowing the type of backlink profile that the top sites have in everyone's niche.

What type of backlinks are they relying on? Is their backlink profile clearly fabricated using deceptive tactics such as spammy blog comments, paid links or blog networks?

Come on guess let's stop bitching about big bad google and work out what's going on! :)