crobb305 - 2:22 pm on Oct 18, 2012 (gmt 0)

Site-wide links from foreign websites, blog roll links, almost all (at least 90%) of the backlink profile on ALL of them comes from websites not even remotely related to the niche. I mean things we used to see about 10 years ago.

You're right. I've posted for a few months now about a website registered in July with 20,000 brand new, foreign backlinks ranking very well in the finance sector. They have recently lost some short-tail phrases, but still sit #1 on the more lucrative longtail phrases. Penguin removed established sites, but did nothing to improve the web or attack spam. I continue to say, consumer beware. And yes, we may need to rethink Penguin. I thought surely the data "refresh" from two weeks ago would have caught that spammy site, but it didn't. In fact, spam moved up, including press releases and yellow pages.