Whatever, all this hasn’t really affected me much as all my promotional work is done manually, as I said. My sites that were on Google’s page one before everyone started to run around like headless chickens are still there, quietly generating traffic and income.

I also still get decent traffic for my newer eBay Aff sites from other search engines which is fine by me - I don’t care where the organic search traffic comes from as long as it comes!

They’ve always been on the lookout for paid linking and blatant link farms schemes and they’ve always discounted links from low quality or duplicate sources. I don’t see them giving any new priority to discounting scuttle or article sites. It looks like the same old, same old to me.

You do have a lot of people who’re new to tools like BMD and article/directory submission software. They seem to expect these links to be counted right away when, in reality, it will take a while for them to be counted if they are at all. Newer, less trusted, sites are less likely to get links counted as quickly. Bottom line, many people are being overly paranoid about what has been business-as-usual for a while.

I love it when you disagree with me because you end up agreeing with me on most of the points in the end!

Everything I said in that post is of course my own take on what I see and hear other say is happening right now, but not everyone will see the same effects for the very reasons you point out.

Link juice coming from duplicate content is a sticking point and maybe its more wishful thinking on my part, but that juice has been devalued and will probably continue to be devalued as the Google machine continues to cut swathes through the Internet Marketing / Make Money Online jungle in its relentless march on relevance in its index.

And as for link farms, that one has been a long time coming but inevitable and yes, blogger blogs got hit hard. I think most of us who have the odd new blogger blog have noticed them not doing well lately - not that they’re used for anything other than legitimate purposes, of course.

Interestingly, Squidoo has not been doing quite so badly despite its obvious ease of link providing, but where I’ve noticed big gains is with Hub Pages and Wordpress blogs - both have good measures in place to limit the amount of outbound links making them much less likely to be used for SEO or as link farms. Well, at least by spammers anyway.

Of course the best way to promote sites that will make money online by generating links to them in large numbers and of the best quality is the most expensive and time consuming of all. That’s building lots of self hosted sites using lots of different hosts - more work than spammers are prepared to do or pay for.

So it looks like the all-out war on spammers is starting to bite once again - that is of course until they figure out yet another way to game the system.