diberry - 12:23 am on Jul 10, 2012 (gmt 0)

If your links are carefully selected high quality sites, it would be a worry to understand you have been penguined because of it.

This is actually an interesting point. *I* think I pick high quality sites to link out to, but I try to avoid Google's top ranked sites because my readers don't need my help to find those - I aim for smaller, less well-known sites that are creating stuff I believe my visitors will value. But I look at sites like a human being, not an algo. It's probable some of the sites I link to don't have much of a backlink profile, because they're just little people contributing to the web and they probably have never heard terms like "inbound link." So who knows how the algo might see it?

But OTOH, if I carefully only picked sites that do well in Google and have strong link profiles, then I would be doing aggressive SEO, wouldn't I? ;)

I'm not always a skeptic but I wonder if there is a degree of misdirection in Google's official line, getting us all focused on de-optimizing our sites so that Google doesn't have to work harder to find those that ARE good at SEO.

That's definitely a possibility - after all, they don't owe us the exact truth about what they're doing. They don't even owe us a public statement.