Who remembers when Google went after the underground link network, SAPE, penalizing them? It seems that history has a way of repeating itself, and this is no exception, as SAPE might have gotten themselves penalized again.
There are reports that finds that there are various “black hat” SEO forums that the website rankings in Google have taken a huge hit overnight. According to the reports that Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land found, each website whose rankings fell all had one thing in common – the link network named SAPE. After the hit SAPE took from Google back in 2013, they revamped their system, and became a network that a number of link schemers used.
Did Google actually go after a specific link network? We really can’t say for sure, as Google doesn’t normally comment about things like this.
So why did this happen? It could have something to do with Google’s promised harsher penalties to webmaster who have repeated violations. The reason why we still can’t be sure if this is a Google penalization is because webmasters haven’t officially confirmed a manual action in their Google Search Consoles. It could also have something to do with either the hacked sites algorithm, or a potential new Penguin update.