Let me start from the beginning, 6 months ago 25 sites of mine were penalized severly (all exactly 50 ranks) that were using DigitalPoint Co-op network. I have no doubt in my mind that they were penalized b/c of DP b/c sites that did not have it, remined fine, and literally every site that did got penalized. I lost 3 #1's, and several #2's and #3's - these were big sites in the network. 6 months later I rebuild part of my network, but not completetly. It was very demotivating - as you could imagine, to get penalized from #1 to #51 heh. Anyways, I wake up today and several of my sites are ranking in on the first page again - doing a bit of the google dance. Was it worth it using DigitalPoint? Thats hard to say - but everyone needs to know that its risky - but google does forgive =).
Indeed, penalization stories are always interesting and informative - could you please expand on yours.
recently i did heavy link pop for my site on two keyphrases. After some days it started to rank on the first page on one of the keyphrases. But now it has gone down to page number 3. Is that bcoz of Google penalizing my site for excessive linking.