I have many Real Estate keyword clients (city+real estate) I manage SEO for, and was curious if any other keyword spaces have been slapped with a hand-job from Y because of reciprocal link networks, automated or not. Anyone have knowledge of a non-real estate site that suddenly disappeared from Yahoo because of a link exchange network they suspect Y has singled out specifically? Yahoo is still easily manipulated by these links, except when they find out and strip away your inbounds . Thanks!
BareFootSEO - You mention penalty, but also say "strip away your inbounds". Do you believe the site(s) dissappeared due to a penalty, or just lack of inbounds? Do you think they discounted the suspect links, or more than that? I notice they don't seem to show links they suspect, but am curious if they actually remove them from your list ?
Can't really comment further about specific stuff that went on, but yeah, Yahoo has the power to (and will) remove all inbound link credit and/or remove you from the index entirely if they think you're link spamming too much. They'll even remove entire c-blocks if they think it's a spam network! They're known for stepping in and manually slapping what's officially known as a "hand job" (no kidding!) on whatever they see fit. Don't mess with Slurp! You'll get Slapped! LOL...