Opinions please on Penalized for un-natural linking

[littlecloud]

In March I decided to change my main search term for my main site. So i went and changed around 200 links to my main site all in 1-2 days. I was kicking but for this one word term until a month later when google penalized all those links i changed. The question is now i am seeing drops in other rankings for sites that have incoming links from those 200 sites but i did not change those links so did all the links from those sites get penalized?

[tedster]

changed around 200 links to my main site all in 1-2 days

My opinion - with that change you proved to Google that you have control over a multi-site network and will use it to try to improve rankings. Yes, I think you may well see some rolling trouble in the SERPs.

Google has both direct and secondary ways of monitoring this kind of thing. For example, they watch the churn in the SERPs to catch any urls that show sudden and dramatic upward movement. If their intentional algo changes don't explain the jump, they dig deeper and may throw "a flag on the play".

[soxos]

As you are able to simultaneously change links on 200 sites, not only does Google detect you are able to control these links in a self-serving way they will be be devalued - and not just the links pointing to the site you changed your link text for, but all their outbound links will be devalued. So your fears are correct, and I have no idea who you can reverse this, if you can reverse this.

My course of action would be to try and get some seriously hi trust links to your homepage in an damage limitation attempt.

[ecmedia]

It is also the experience of many users that penalties like this are not permanent. They are often restored after a period of time because many of such changes can sometimes be genuine. For example if a company makes red widgets and they stop selling because people do not like red any more and the company then starts making blue widgets, the company's webmaster has no choice but to make anchor text changes to reflect the change.