Guilty by Mere Association?

Can such association put you on the radar?

[mrrob]

I manage a fairly high profile blog for a client of mine who is an acclaimed author in the area of finance. I don't do much SEO for the blog except a few quality one way and recip links. Normal legit link building, no paid links. The blog shows up for tons of long tail terms as well as some fairly big high volume terms.

I discovered someone else in this finance field who created 50+ websites, all almost identical in domain name and content, all linked togehter, all pointing back to a main domain, which is also linked on every site. Our blog link was one of five he placed on his links section. We are an authority in this field so it makes sense.

We've all seen these stupid beginner link tricks before but I've never been part of one, until now. And now out of the blue, our rankings have literally plummeted. From looking at the pages history, our link has been part of this site network for about 2 months.

My question is, can such an association trigger a Google penalty?

Note: pagerank hasn't changed, backlinks still intact, everything else is normal.

[jbinbpt]

The conventional theory is that you can only be hurt by your actions. You cannot fool Google into penalizing your competitor. I doubt there is much you can do. Don't worry about the competition.

[mrrob]

Actually, I hope that is true. Removes those nagging thoughts.

[freelistfool]

The one thing I'd do is make sure you're not linking to any site in that network. Most links TO your site can't hurt your rankings. However, links FROM your site to a "bad neighborhood" can cause you to be penalized by google.