Google is a big bully and cry baby, who can't at all algorythemically determine a blog network from a hole in the wall, as well, links are the very fabric, DNA of the internet, and they are still a time out from being able to accurately or decently determine how to appropriately value links and link structures.
What is a natural linking structure and quality content....I keep hearing "quality content" and want to throw up on each page that has those words on it... Flea Markets - What's one man's trash is another's treasure - quality for one person is garbage to another...
XRumer - Press Release
Scrapebox - blog network
Spun Content - Depending how bad - Comedy, Parody, ESL(english second language) writers...
Of course all of the above are weak or examples that stretch it a bit, or even not right on, but..... Think about it...
What I'm seeing:
Google doesn't like the fact that they are being gamed and mastered by folks with blog networks, and advertising dollars are being diverted from their coffers in the form of either adwords/adsense or content in their index and are embarrassed a bit by it, a black eye.... Either that or someone internal needed to justify their job, needed to allocate budget before it was lost, needed publicity, or things had become to calm, or even that they are being overrun by Facebook and needed to counter...... whatever the reason...
SO - they concoct a scheme - let's join a few blog networks or linking networks because we can't detect them at all (at least the well built ones) and post some posts, track down the sites on which the posts are on, identify and catalogue the other sites that are linked to as well. Then, check all of the incoming links for those sites, and track down the blog network.
Then, lets whack all of their pages, deindex them, and then scream from the rooftops, do it to a few others, and then instill fear and panic into the hearts and minds of webizens everywhere and parlay that into a bit of mass hysteria. For icing on the cake, let's randomly (or perhaps a half baked algo or subset of users) send out millions of notices talking about artificial linking policies and remove your offending, bad, or "EVIL" links, then click for request for inclusion....
Funny thing here with this is that I've seen sites that haven't moved a position in the serps get them, as well as sites who've tanked, or even maybe the rare oddball who's been reindexed. Most of them in the first two categories - got the notice but haven't moved or got the notice and lost 20 to 50 positions. One poor client, who just hopped aboard about 2 weeks ago lost about 60% of his traffic in the past few weeks. Much too early into our campaign for anything we've done with them to affect them either way...
So, we've got less than what, 10 blog networks manually reindexed to much hoopla and hysteria, nothing algorithmically done here, not an algorithmic play at all.... COMPLETELY MANUAL......
So, phase one is rolling along good....
Oh, forgot the appetizer, the incremental Panda on or around Feb 27th, can't remember exact date, but...
Then the blog network circus.... I've never before seen such press, controversy, misunderstanding, and to do made about the removal of a few sites from a search engines index.....pretty amazing, funny, and pathetic.
I do very much feel for the site owners, as well as those linked to from them, but, rebuild relink, or find another link source. I seriously doubt you've been penalized (unless you are actually the blog network), so DO NOT CLICK on the request for re-inclusion notices - why would you want to raise your hand for a manual review, call attention to yourself for something that can most likely be handled by a few hundred/thousand links, give information to the evil moister Google so it can improve their ability to detect and filter links, etc.
I think that most people who think they've been penalized or marked for the SERP grave yard have not - simply need to rebuild, and rebuild fast...
Then, the next ingredient Penguin (is that on the endangered species list? don't know....) Over-optimization penalty... Shake up your anchor text, deep link, and crank up the linking machine..... Penguin is a tweak to their algorithm, not an intelligent spy who's visiting your site, computer, and/or brain collecting information, but an algo tweak. Vary and shake up your link text, page to which you're linking, and just common sense...
So, what is a webmaster/site owner to do?
Existing sites - patience, link building, and reassessment and analysis of on page. Not a fun or optimal answer, but.... Go back to the basics, and reassess what you are doing, make sure it's on track, and build links.
Link building has been, is, and will be for some time to come, the main - by a HUGE MARGIN - ranking factor. Anchor text specific link building, done sensibly and correctly, will rank a site in no time flat. Of course the more difficult the niche/market the more time/links. MANY factors obviously - age of site, content, on page optimization, page load speed, hosting location, neighborhood, and literally tons of factors, but they pale in comparison to linking.
Last month we ranked a brand new site for a medium competitive keyword, from not on the map to first page, in 6 weeks. xxxx personal injury lawyer, city being one of the top 10 largest us cities.
We also ranked a site for a term that was completely unrelated in a medium competition keyword phrase (over 11 million competition allintitle) that didn't have a single thing to do with the keyword/phrase... Simply with links. About 180 or so to be exact... It's been there now for over 2 months. Variation of the "Google Bomb".... Google it...;)
Pretty much the same recipe for linking that's worked since 1999 - do some keyword research (which is a crap shoot at best, and nothing exists which will provide comprehensive information on this, or statistics). The only thing that can is Goog - which won't, and they could only provide stats on less than half of all search terms, taking into account the percentage of unique searches....
I think numbers in their keyword tool should be taken with a beach, not just a grain of sand...), but they're one of the few places that attempts to take a stab at it. I seriously doubt they release accurate data there - they don't anywhere else (site links, etc.) why would they start with the keyword tool.... Plus the amount of unique search is high enough that it's a serious contender, so getting the general areas, niching them down, and building quantity content around though spheres in a good start...
Register you main thought sphere, topic or keyword phrase as your domain name, or pick some crazy, off the wall made up word, or something for branding or marketing ( a la Google), then, create directories from there with your main thought spheres. within the dirs, create pages named after particular sub-though spheres and create as much content as you can on different pages, named accordingly. Keep page size reasonably, and use those to feed into whatever funnel you have going, or arrange them around your adwords, affiliate links, or products.
Then, map keywords to your site map. Build links to each of the pages with it's main keywords, as well as use the url itself as anchor text, click here, more information, etc.
Then, as you build links and increase content to decent levels, casting a wider and wider net to catch the long tail, unique, as well as targeted volume phrases, throw some video channels, optimized, some individual video pages. Drive traffic to your site via YouTube, Facebook Page, SERPS, etc.
Put your head down, quit reading blog posts, and get to linking....
Oh, except this one - http://www.solution416.com/blog/c/googles-decision-deindex It goes over a few important points I didn't cover here, as well identifies the networks that got shut down. Less than a dozen by my count so far, so hardly the "earth shattering shakeup" that it's made out to be....
Ok, NOW put your head down, quit reading blog posts, and get to linking.....
Except this one - www.coolbubba.com or www.coolbubba.com/blog the /blog part is the old, legacy blog and site, which is currently in works to be replaced. The new site and blog will be available at www.coolbubba.com, and the old part will still be available for reference... soon....:)
Another thought.... If a site has been experiencing a recent drop or issues, exact dates of the drops would be a great place to start a conversation, as there have been multiple things going on with Google lately. Penguin, over optimization, incremental panda, etc. From on or around Feb 27 until now, it's basically been a mine field for quite a few folks. Have you clicked the button for manual review and waiting on the SE gods at Google to give the nod to your site and resurrect it..... I hardly think so. For your site to be reinstated to it's previous rankings, you need to build links to account for what link juice/pr was lost... Check your inbound links anchor text using something like either www.majesticseo.com or linkbuilding.wordtracker.com
One thing that I've been reminding all of my clients of is that what has happened lately is ALGORITHMIC, not manual (except the few blog networks, what less than a dozen of them? http://www.solution416.com/blog/c/googles-decision-deindex)... thus, no notices in Webmaster tools of the new stuff/Penguin, the only thing manually to happen in the past few months has been the few blog networks that were taken out, loud noise made about it, millions (literally) of notices about artificial linking to instill fear into the hearts of the citizens, and cause panic, get them to feel guilty, remove anything questionable or that they feel may be "bad" or "evil" and then phone mother Google and let her know that all is well (and so they can then analyze all changes in linking activity to sites over the past few months, and garner as much info as they can about linking, and artificial vs. natural, and attempt to, in the future, tune their ability to detect such "linking schemes" with said information, but they aren't anywhere near able to detect such things naturally or algorithmically, which is good news for us..... How is that for a disgustingly long run-on sentence? 
It's a glaring observation that they had to resort to doing a few blog network take-downs manually, make it high profile and parade around the corpses of the networks and sites slaughtered in the process, and then blanket the land with "artificial linking notices" which were sent to people who were not affected by the changes in the least bit, to people who disappeared from the rankings (due totally to things other than linking in 99.99999% of the cases...)
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