Is this the end of industrial scale linking?

[Whitey]

I wanted to propose that industrial scale linking has been removed by Google.

Small sites don't do industrial scale linking. Big sites did and some probably still do. Only brand sites survived.

If anyone get's industrial scale links, or spikes, Google will look at it. If they are legit, they'll hold, if not they'll be ignored or create a penalty [ like Interflora ]

Are we in a new era - thoughts?

[deadsea]

Are you talking about inbound links or outbound links for a site?

[Whitey]

My primary thoughts were inbound and outbound.

[deadsea]

I don't see having massive numbers of outbound links as a problem as long as they are well curated. I'm seeing UGC content sites with moderation systems creating huge quantities of content that includes massive amounts of links. I can't imagine Google would want to stop paying attention to such a rich source of link signal.

On the other hand, I'm sure Googlebot crawls tons of cheap directories and search results with massive external links that they would like to ignore.

On the inbound side, being popular in the blogs can generate massive numbers of inbound links in a few days as a popular article makes the rounds. Google may with to ignore that, but it certainly shouldn't penalize for it.