UPDATE:
After further notice it appears to be somewhat algorithmic in nature, and somewhat manual. Some sites I have noticed have gotten completely docked, and some sites have only had penalizations at the page level. Will keep an eye on this as it unfolds.
I talked to Matt Cutts, and he explained that if you are trying to recoup some of your lost rankings, then the best course of action is to get the paid links removed by contacting the site owners and telling them to take them down. Once you have made a good faith effort of removing the links then they might consider the reconsideration request.
Not sure how feasible it is to get this done, but this is what he said none the less.
It looks like Google has finally started pushing, what appears to be in typical “scalable” fashion, a paid link algorithm that is completely knocking out pages (not entire sites) that it feels have been heavily gamed via paid links.
This is going to open up a whole new can of worms, and will be interesting to watch how it unfolds in the coming weeks and months. Competitor sabotage here we come?
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m still have to respond to your e-mail buddy, but this will be interesting to see.
You have to think that they have to have thought through the sabotage part already right?
This is going to be interesting, because I know of many reputable white hat SEO firms that have engaged in link buys (and endorsed certain link brokers) for some well-known websites before the whole link buying gauntlet dropped. I hope they factor into their algorithm recent link buys rather than the older ones. On the other hand, Google was against link buys all along.
If competitors snitch because they do a backlink check and find a paid blog post or something, companies can get in trouble because of a wrong move an outside consultant made. And that hurts.