[Do you think that website owners that have articles submitted through linkvana.com, ezinearticles.com, content sooner and the like, will actually get penalized for having the one-way links produced from the service of these websites? Because if those networks and submission services will be bad from now on, article marketing is practically dead! What I do believe is that Google will delete the sub-pages that duplicate content is found from article directories with the same exact title/body content, slowly, as the same article gets index and traced by Google. The first networks and directories that publish the content are also the usual articles that stay index for a very long time.]
Contrary to the hyperbole emulating from so many spreading rumors, those websites were not penalized. Google did update its algorithm and it does change the valuation for certain types of content. That in and of itself is not a penalty.
Google’s latest update did not target any specific websites, it targeted pages with poor quality content. Google has been devaluing the trust that passes from low-quality content for many years. This latest update simply automated what they had already been doing in a semi-automatic fashion.
As always, links from low-quality content are being devalued and links from higher quality content pages carry more weight. The only thing new is the speed in which it takes place. The closing of this time gap removes the incentive for web spammers since their spam will no longer carry weight during the time between when it is indexed and when it gets detected and devalued. By detecting this spam immediately Google closes the window of opportunity for spammers.
It seems to me that some junk articles on EA were devalued and many pages that were propped up by webspam dropped in rankings while other pages are doing just fine. It’s as if the “site” itself was not effected just those “pages” on the site that were propped up by spam.
