Mounting Evidence Penguin 3.0 Doesn't Work How You Think

I'd say fix the link first.

Linking out to penalized sites can lead to ranking issue's for the site linking out yes, I often see it with my private blog network sites that often rank real poor, despite tons of juice, even when we keep them hyper relevant, reason is that there are always some penalized clients in between them that devalue the own ranking strength of the site. However it doesn't affect the outgoing link juice in any way, weird but true.

Funny enough a link from a penalized domain doesn't hurt the rankings of the site you link out to either, instead it benefits from it.

I have this SEO site that receives footer links from 15 of my Amazon sites, most tanked during Penguin 3.0, the SEO site is still ranking fine. Though the sites don't rank out to a penalized site (SEO site is ranking pretty well), I will still try to remove some to see what happens with the rankings of the Amazon sites (I suspect not much as they don't link to a penalized site but still, just curious).

Have to say I find it a bit unlikely that most of the sites in their recovery case studies deal with hidden links, what conclusions can we draw from that? If you're a little bit into conspiracies you'd think it's a huge setup.

I recommend you provide more info in your original post, or there is a risk mods remove it, and we wouldn't want that to happen.

Something else I like to add myself from previous Penguin updates, high quality sites were much less sensitive to spammy links then low quality / crappy sites so there is definitely a relation between them. Hence a low quality crappy site would in theory be able to recover when Penguin refreshes by not adjusting links but hugely improving the quality of the site as these things go hand in hand. WIth Penguin 3.0 I didn't notice these strong differences though, that mostly seemed to be about amount of relevant links vs links on irrelevant pages.

I do absolutely NOT agree with removal of outbound link value on sites, reason for that is that I have tons of clients that are still ranking fine with the very same links as others that tanked. So if that statement were true then every single client of mine would have tanked. I'm talking about sites that only received links from me and not a single other link from elsewhere so that makes it water proof.

Besides that I have multiple sites ranking based on links from penalized domains alone so that proofs it even more.

Penguin penalties are really attached to the money site and don't affect the sites that link to it, perhaps in their ranking ability yes, but not in their linking strength.

If you want I can proof it to you by PM, it's a good post for the rest but don't mess it up with such things.

As for this statement:

"Policing efforts always work best when they punish the seller, not the buyer. History has born this out"

Yes they punish the seller for it's own ranking ability or they deindex the whole site (end of story), that's often enough punishment, would make more sense to delete the link value but I think that's technically a little more difficult then most think.

Think of it, if it was so easy to just devalue the links then why would Google deindex sites? By devalueing they would make it much harder for us to figure it out while by deindexing it's clear that domain is done and the seller can replace it. Starts to make sense?

Also think why domains that were dropped ages ago still have their link strength. All leads to think that devalueing of links is impossible with the current algorithm, setup.

As for this part:

"Matt Cutts has specifically said that, in most cases, if a site gets penalized and it links to you, it doesn't suppress your ability to rank, you simply lose some or all of the value of that link."

That's a LIE, my sites rank solely based on sites from Penguilized sites, unless he doesn't treat that as a penalty or maybe he confuses deindexed domains with penalized domains. That would make sense, a link from a deindexed domain doesn't work but it doesn't hurt you either (still I would remove them asap, just in case), doesn't look very pretty to have links from deindexed domains. Maybe these links hit me in the next Penguin refresh, who shall say, but right now the value is definitely not nullified as my rankings maintain and the site doesn't have any other links.

It's way easier to let certain sites drop in the rankings, eg give them a penalty, then it is to build in a system that devalues this link, but not this link, and that link yes and so on. Probably to much of an obstacle for the crawlers.

Did you know that Matt Cutts once said:

"We might lower the pagerank of a site to take away the incentive of a buyer"

Now we're getting somewhere, why on earth would they do that if he could just devalue the links. I have once again proof of that, I can show you numerous domains where they lowered the PR to 0 or 1, while the site is still as strong as always and when you check the backlink profile it still has plenty of PR3-PR4-PR5 backlinks.

Why would they pull all these tricks if the solution could be so easy by just devalueing links?

Perhaps cause it's not as easy as we think?

I purposely did not make it a hyper link. Not sure if that is allowed.

As for more info so Mods won't pull the thread, I really do not know what info to post. I just found this article and though it was interesting and wanted some of my WF buddies to post their opinion.

I have nothing to do with the page and first time I ever heard of the guy that posted it

Good insight in your post

This is not a completely new theory but I doubt that I could find the articles from 2012 that expressed a similar concept.

The problem with this of course is that a lot of penguin punished pages and sites that didn't link out to anything besides things like adsense or other affiliate links while that the same time there are thousands upon thousands of examples of pages linking out to (only) the same places that did not get punished by penguin. This of course indicates that the outbound links weren't the problem as they were the same in both cases while the inbound links were not.

That's pure nonsense. Think about web site directories such as DMOZ, Yahoo directory,
and lots of more legetimate website directory that didn't and never got penalized by Penguin.

Everyone more or less knows that Penguin is a filter on your site that applied for some specific
keywords that you wanted to rank unnaturally. It's more likely causing from inbound anchor texts.
But from what that article tries to speak, there's no sign of keyword filteration, but the whole site
is penalized for excessive outbound links. That's not true.

There's not one-only reason for Penguin and Panda that someone wants to discover.
Google collects lots of data, and signals before it decides which site to catch.

LOL this stuff makes me laugh.

His reason why Google doesn't penalize sites for inbound links is because Google crawls the web forward, not backward.

And, I'm done...