Google Takes Down PostJoint and 7 Japanese Networks

We like to rank fast and cheap so we need to break some rules.

Lol what a totally irrelevant comment is that.

I rest my case.

Collateral damage for sure, otherwise I would've been hit much worse.

The sites were easily recognizable as blog network sites.

They can't be slapping all Hostgator but they can target their pool of reseller IP's if they suspect that it contains a lot of blog network sites.

With hostgator reseller you could get many IP's in the past, nowadays they require you to buy a certain certificat as they're short on IP's. I guess that's why they merged a number of individual shared hosting plans in that pool of IP's, and that's the only reason why I'm pissed cause I'm pretty sure that if they didn't make that merge I wouldn't have lost those domains (simply cause my other domains at 3 Hostgator accounts are untouched, ones they didn't merge).

I buy separate hosting plans for a good reason and spend good money on it, and not to get screwed like this.

I did a reverse IP check on two of the IP's that I know belong to that pool and found about 300 sites hosted, half of those 300 sites were deindexed so I expect they give it a quick manual look.

There were a few domains of mine that were slightly better setup and those were left alone, on the same host, while if they took the time they could easily see it are blog network sites as well so I think it's a hasty manual job. There were also some better setup domains of mine that were deindexed, which confirms it for me even more that it's manual work, one reviewer is more picky then the other one of course.

Actually after checking my churn & burn network I also see some other sites deindexed, which are hosted with Skynet and ASEOhosting. Those have very low prio for me and I expect to lose a few domains a month there.

Totally agree. Reseller hosting has plenty of viable uses. SEO hosting is used almost entirely for crappy private networks.

My guess is some of it is a PR stunt.

However, they could also setup 4-5 accounts with the service. Throw in some domains and start participating. Do that for 4-5 weeks, gather a pool of say 75-100 domains that are part of the network. From there, it is just like pulling on a thread. You just keep checking which sites they are linking to, pulling all the backlinks of those sites, then seeing where those sites link to. Rinse and repeat.

From there, I'm guessing it is manual reviews. Might seem time consuming, but really if you had just 10 people to go through 1000 sites, you could knock that out in 2 hours. Most network sites can be identified in 30 seconds or less.