You have probably heard of gotlinks.com. I heard of it through linkadage.com auctions and bought a 4000 links package from them. Well within days of doing that my site got destroyed. I used to have an average of 1500 uniques/day + 6000 page views/day. Now I have 200 uniques/day 500 pageviews/day. What's even more disturbing is that all of the pages the links appear are dynamic in the form of www.site.com/category=<category_name> and do have links with anchor texts of type "link exchange"/etc... I believe these are super easily detectable and quite possibly penalized by google. I could be wrong but my 2 cents... don't use that program.
Oh no! That's just not nice! Does that mean that google hates you forever, or is it just temporary dislike?
Google has said before that they are starting to penalise sitewide links.. Much better just to purchase individual links on related high pr websites.
Yeah happend to one of my sites, i WAS using g*tlinks for over a year, and thought ok it's only 30$ per month, got lots of backlinks ... but after a while my site was not doing that well, (i forgot about the g*tlinks campaign) and couldn't put my finger on it ... it was only when i checked a few of the links that i foundto my horror my site was involved in a kind'a' link spammy farm ......... g*tlinks.com is really is a network of very poor links, (now quite a large network, and i think G has been and penalizing my site for this) - i knew G was upto something as a lot of there own (g*tlinks.c*m site) pages lost all pr. Another one to watch out for is backlinks.c0m - same company, again lost time, money and pr from them - works differently as you see the links that you want to buy, but G is seeing them too - and over time pr is lost on the sites ... monthly subscriptions - again pain in the ar*e cancelled all and am waiting for a credit from them, don't think i'll get it! ... Still warning people to be carefull. On the backlinks.c0m front is was paying 300$ a month - and was keeping a good eye on them, i was on vacation over the xmas period this year for a few weeks and came back into the office, got back into the swing of things ... didn't check the listings on backilnks until mid to late Feb time and too my horror all the sites i was linked too lost all pr i had quite a few links on pr6, 7 and one pr8 site AHHHHHHHHHH been paying for a minimum of 2 months for pr0 ... i did send an email or 2 to them, without a successful reply. I now see that they have a pr9 site, which is a re-direct spamified fake ... url is http://opensource3.osdir.com/trademarks/ - shows one link for a casino site - sadly they have not done there home work on the url - the cost of this link alone is 300$ per month.
Everything I have read really pushes for legit link building. I'm having my own problem right now where I have exclusive links to my site on some strong page ranked sites and content is very related but for different purposes. For some reason Google doesn't see them. Unsure whats wrong, but we have only been live 8 weeks. Is that enough time for them to start showing?
Well... now what they are doing is forcing me to use my account to put links pointing to my competition. (Since I already paid for the account)