Russian Do-Follow Link Selling Network Hit by Google

SAPE.RU - Contextual Link Selling Network

[Whitey]

Any of those using SAPE links were supposedly penalized and downgraded in their rankings over the past 24 hours or so. [seroundtable.com...]

Matt Cutts : just another day at the office for me. :) Okay, gotta look at some really naughty Russian link selling software now.

FWIW - reports of another code based link network biting the dust, with references to a much earlier Tweet by Matt Cutts indicating his interest in putting a Russian network to sleep.

It seems this type of things has a high degree of manual intervention, before sending out tracers and a flicking of the switch to bring the network down. Academic really [ except for those affected ] - but it does demonstrate how simple it can be for Google in this particular style of system.

[edited by: martinibuster at 2:19 pm (utc) on Mar 8, 2013]
[edit reason] Fixed formatting. [/edit]

[martinibuster]

This was a do-follow "contextual" link selling network. They placed do-follow links within the body of blog articles. What I find interesting about it is that it was unnoticed for so long. Possibly because Google is organized in a top-down fashion, with English language decisions at the top and other languages more or less under the radar?

[Philosopher]

Interesting...I get ton's of marketing emails all the time and remember getting an email in regard to this network just a few weeks ago attempting to get people to sign up to it as it would be "impossible" for Google to figure it out due to it's size and "complexity".

I chuckled and went on about my business.

[brotherhood of LAN]

I wonder if it requires them to sign up and spend cash to figure it out, or whether it's patterns & footprints that has them ousted.