There likely needs to be a bit of a distinction between a low quality link and a spammy one. A perfectly legit link can pass very little equity (PageRank in Google terms), that to me is a low quality link. Again, Penguin is more about spam right? So we want to think in terms of;

irrelevant links
links from spammy locales (splogs etc)
link networks
comment links
profile links
social spamming

Most people know what they are. If it's feeling 'too easy' there's a good chance it could be classified by the search engines as being spammy.

IMO, "low quality links" must be considered all those ones which rely exclusively on exact matching commercial anchor text, and that placed in clearly not editorial areas (footer, sidebar, link pages, links farms, SEO directories) or that - because of their over optimized nature - seems contraddicting their apparently editorial content (i.e.: forum and comment marketing, blogrolls...)

From a programmer standpoint a low quality link is one that is not contextually relevant to the site being linked to. If I was Google I would devalue these completely across the board. I would measure the semantic value of pages and extract entities using Natural Language Processing and if it the combination of those results didn't hit a certain threshold I would not count the link at all.
From an SEO standpoint it's more or less the same except I base it on standard SEO metrics in addition to the quality of the site.

Low quality to me makes me think of SEO forums and Fiverr gigs where you're getting link wheels, blog comment spam, profile spam and the like. Just because you've built a site on "buy whatever" doesn't mean that you should be able to inflate your own rankings to get top ranking. I may get thrown under a bus for saying this, but if the majority if your link building methods don't earn you any editorial/naturally given links then you're business isn't going to survive in the organic search results.

I am not sure.

I'm not sure it was devalued - depends on how you think about it. I think ABUSE was devalued, I think it probably is still super effective to a certain threshold, just turns out that threshold is now lower. Of course, this is my guess, and not based on fact.

Maybe a little bit, but all Penguin did was hurt those who were doing things that they already know was wrong. There's nothing wrong with exact anchors, and there never will be, but moderation is the most essential part when pursuing them. 99% of the time when I do outreach, I never ask for anchor text; I take what ever is given to me. And that's why it's much easier to look natural by letting others do it for you.

Devalued in some instances, yes – but only where the link pattern started to look unnaturally manipulative through anchor text. I think in some ways, anchor text is now more important than ever – except that now, there may be a negative impact if you overdo it. Further – I think that the penalty for overdoing it is much more extreme than previously.

Absolutely. We know Google turned off a key link signal a few weeks ago and Google is NOT about to do that without iterating and improving their core algo. In testing we have carried out to date our feeling is that Relevance of Page has been 'turned up' as a rank signal and that makes a lot of sense as part of their wider plans to promote useful, respected web entities and sites within their own respected niches.

I don't think anchor text was devalued. I think over-done anchor text has been devalued, but anchor text used in balance has not been devalued. I say this because I have seen many examples of specific keywords tanking on sites that had way too many exact anchors for these terms, but other terms on the site are ranking just fine.

Anchor text still necessary for ranking, but must be used in conjunction with branded and other random anchors too in order to rank well.

No. Absolutely not. I have been asking Google to ignore anchor text for years but I don't think they'll ever do that. Anchor text plays just as important a role in Google's algorithms today as it ever has (although the SEO community has way overvalued that role). What Google has done is simply divide the Web into "links we'll trust" and "links we won't trust".

No, I don't think anchors were devalued, i think certain "obstacles" were placed so that anchor manipulation would not be so profitable as it was before. As far as I can tell, anchor is still the major (if not the exclusive) way of passing relevancy through a hyperlink, however Google is now looking with more care into how your anchor profile looks like. I like to compare it to an accelerator in a car - pushing on the accelerator pedal is the best way of making the car go faster. It also happens to be the best way of getting into a car crash or getting a speeding ticket, but it doesn't mean that in order to accelerate there is something else to do other than push on that pedal. The fact that there are more cops and that the speed limit was lowered (unless your car is branded with big brand stickers) doesn't mean that the accelerator does something different than what it did before.

Again, if we're talking about link spam, we think in terms of thresholds. Think in terms of ratios. Is it natural to have a high percentage of exact match anchors? Not at all. Look at sites that have done no active link building for SEO and you'll see there is a greater spread. This doesn't seem to be the caseas much so far for exact match domains, but time will tell on that one.

I don't believe that how anchors are treated has changed greatly with the recent updates, as much as the thresholds for what is considered legitimate and what may be flagged as spam.

I believe that right now Google does not need the anchor text the way it needed before in order to understand the "nature" of the page linked. With the technological advance Google had during the last years (Caffeine and Freshness, for instance) and the having Googlebot crawling the web real time, Google really does not need anymore the anchor text as a way of classifing better a page. Just looking at the page "Content Keywords" in Google Webmaster Tool we can see how well Google understand what our site is about.

I don't believe that anchor text is devalued. I don't think Google is actually being that sophisticated. I believe they are devaluing a large amount of sites that were passing link equity and therefore a lot of sites are having their legs cut out from under them. I also think they are penalizing sites whose backlink profiles are top heavy with unbranded anchors.

I don't think it was devalued but more so tweaked to be viewed differently. Go to any search result for any tough keyword and you'll clearly see that websites with an anchor text distribution geared towards site/brand name "natural" anchors are holding it down quite well. With that being said, you can still easily spam yourself into the top 10 quickly with the same junk links targeting your money keyword. I just think the difference now is that when Penguin re-runs, those sites will get knocked out and the next spammer will take its place.

Sure but I don't have permission to share. Google never said there were no false positives that is why they made at http://goo.gl/nt3Pz

There are definitely sites that have wacky looking link profiles, but shouldn't be hit. A good example is wpmu.org that recently got dinged (more details here) and is a prominent use case. They are amongst a crowd of web designers/Wordpress devs that create themes and SHOULD have their links in the footer based on the constructs of the vertical, but based on the conditions of this update, got creamed. It was really hard for them to know that they should be no-following their links, especially without being prominent SEO experts. Here is quick link analysis by the cognitive SEO tool showing 40% footer links ...

Not really, because they're hard to identify (unless you have a client that got hit that was a false positive, which I didn't), but that doesn't mean they're not out there.

I have a real problem with that question. The answer is absolutely – but at the same time - the site concerned probably deserved a bit of a slap on the wrist. However – I don't think the owners of the site know where many of their bad links came from and most worryingly, they are banned on their Trademarked brand, even though they have over 40 stores and assets round $100 Million based on that word. As a result they are "enjoying" 70% CTR at 2 pence per click via Adwords on their trademark, whilst Google arguably passes off other sites as theirs on brand. Now this creates a new legal question. It's Google's index – so they have every right to slap any site they want… but they probably don't have the right to then promote other pages on the web using that trademark. The reinclusion request is as yet without comment or answer.

Not to date. Our clients have so far not had any real issues (and that's an honest answer) so our experience is via website owners contacting them to help them recover. So far that process has been interesting but as Penguin has yet to rerun (to our knowledge) we have not seen any drastic recoveries.
We have been involved in a recovery from an issue that triggered the 'Notice of Unnatural Links' email and that site is now where we would expect it to be given that we had to remove a lot of spammy links. The job now is a new content marketing strategy to earn that authority once again.

I did see one false positive recently in regards to anchor text. It's an EMD(exact match domain) that actually deserves to rank for the terms, insofar that the content is pretty quality. They have not gone crazy on anchor text or too much on directory linkbuilding (though it is a B2B space), but were still hit for certain terms that they had some anchor text in order to be competitive. It seems that Google went too far in this case.

None so far. But then I can only look at so many Websites. Of course, there are a couple of sites where I wonder if they should have been affected by Penguin but their owners disclose so little information that I have no way of knowing when they lost traffic or if it was connected to Penguin. People who lost traffic a week after April 25 are blaming Penguin. Quite possibly what they are seeing is a Cascade Effect where the Websites that link to them suddenly lose value and so the real problem lies 1 or 2 tiers back. These are not false positives, although they are collateral damage.

It is hard to say whether any Penguin positives are false, especially since no one has lifted the Penguin penalty from affected sites yet. The only way to say with any degree of reasonable certainty that your site was affected by Penguin is if you know that the site was involved in link activities that are suspect of causing the penalty AND if the hammer dropped on the 24th of April. Similarly, the only way to know that your Penguin penalty was lifted as a result of your actions, would be by seeing your traffic being restored on the date Google announces that the next round of Penguin was implemented.

I assume that some false positives will appear after these things happen, especially since some Panda (and other) updates happened closely to Penguin, but we need for future roll-outs to happen to know for sure.

Many people who buy links do not manage them properly. That is true at least in Romania where I mostly work. Not knowing which links you are about to lose is a common practice over here. So each time partnerships expire clients panic and think they got penalized by Google. Knowing that Google has a new update for backlinks got them into paranoia.
So first thing they do after the panic is to buy more links so they will get their ranks up again instead of renewing the old partnerships that were good. Some of them use to ask SEOs about what to do and they get proper answers.
Some of them think that they got penalized because they did not invest money in PPC campaigns. Of course, someone must tell them that is more than a paranoid thinking...

To be honest, not really. None of our actual clients (managed campaigns) were affected. We do a fair amount of consulting to sites that were, but in most cases the link profiles were a house of cards and they were playing the 'it works for the other guy' (http://searchnewscentral.com/20120509293/General-SEO/seo-excuse-143-the-other-guy-is-doing-it-so-it-must-work.html) game. Meaning they had nasty anchor text ratios and a large portion of the link profiles were made up of some of the suspect types of links I mentioned earlier.

Sincerely not. What I've seen is that sites which objectively have bad link profiles were not penalized, or they were not heavily penalized, just because the ratio between commercial anchor text and branded anchor texts was equilibrated or not so strong on the commercial side.

No, I haven't seen anything like this for our clients. I read a story in the Google Webmaster Forum, but I can't speak to specifics since the person wouldn't share them.

You can still go search for "buy viagra" and "buy cialis" in Google and the top spots are hacked .edu's and spammed to death social profiles. You'd think they'd have a better handle on that but it clearly shows that link spam still works easily for a short period of time....enough time to make some bank so I doubt we'll see a stoppage to this kind of activity.

Funny, because now there is un-link building going on. I still see link building to be a huge SEO component, but link builders will be much more careful.

Lots of SERPs will be pretty clean, lots of content development - with many people making a lot of crappy content because they have no idea how to execute after having done grey/black hat SEO their entire lives. Lots of businesses will take a long time to catch up, because the easy solutions aren't easy anymore. But really, I see it being the same - you'll just get a bigger whiff of people attempting and failing in the background.

More so for traffic, trust, and sales than SEO. The term link building will never go away, but the end goal will start to change. Ranking #1 for a keyword 3 years ago is a lot different than what it is today for some queries, because Google is starting to crowd SERPs with more ads, different media types, and their own properties. All this means is that the rewards of ranking towards the top are diminishing over time. I talk about this more here.

I see it much more aligned with more traditional marketing activity. I still see it as extremely important, through, but there needs to be more thought about the context and meaning behind the links.

We have been guest posting for around 10 months now and I see this naturalised form or online PR replacing manipulative practices. The key now is to become a knowledge centre and work hard on promoting that fact to the key influencers in your niche.

Linkbuilding has been and is now more moving towards being more PR. It's content built for and outreached to targeted personas for links. I think tactics like broken linkbuilding, etc will still work, but those aren't strategies - they're tactics for having a better chance of getting a response.

The future of linkbuilding is earning the links, not just finding places to easily place your links. We've been beating this drum for a while, but I think it is finally coming to fruition.

Just as spammy as ever. The SEO community just does not want to let go of really bad ideas. In my experience it takes people about 2 years to stop sharing bad SEO practices. Google came out in June 2009 and said that PageRank Sculpting never did what SEOs promised it would do, and that they had changed the way "rel='nofollow'" worked more than a year previously to diminish the harm that this bad SEO practice was inflicting on Websites. Nonetheless, even in 2011 I was still seeing people talk about the benefits of PageRank Sculpting.

And there have been other examples going farther back in time where bad SEO practices were clearly given the boot by search engines but people continued to use them for years afterward. Even today people are still talking about Keyword Density, which plays absolutely no role in Google's ranking algorithms.

If the things stay on the same course, I think there will be a much bigger focus on where the link is coming from vs. what the anchor of the link is. I can tell you already now, that I feel much better when the link I get has the brand name or the URL or some long tail variation of the head term for anchor, rather than the exact match head term itself. This will probably be hard on small businesses, with low industry online presence, that find it much harder to create linkable content. < sarcasm > Surprisingly, this may drive these businesses towards other forms of advertising, for example paid advertising through Adwords . However, I trust the community to find new and creative ways to build "natural" links and continue that evolutionary arms race between the marketers and the search engines.

That's really hard to say. Again, at my firm we tend to do a great deal of more organic link building in combination with some foundational types of approaches. I see our role as being builders of authority and trust, not just links. As we've seen, Google can turn on a dime and simply getting links for the sake of a link, doesn't hold water for me as a long term strategy and use of client resources.

And that's the crux; we have no idea what's to come. We watched Panda updates for some 18 months and tried to keep adapting. The same will likely be true for the Penguin roll outs. At the end of the day, not to sound TOO Googly, I believe strong content balanced with traditional and social promotion is something worth doing. Again, we want to do more than just get links. We want to build the client a following and build authority and trust.

I see it as a renewed activity. Surely harder, but without a doubt more interesting and pleasant to do. Link Building will be more connected (or even more connected) to Content Marketing and Brand Marketing, evolving from a somehow "isolated" activity to a more integrated tactic.

I would personally like to see a bigger move toward content strategy, but SEO needs to grow up more before we can all make that happen across the board.

I don't think much will have changed from what's going on now other than more people will be building junky links with "natural" anchor text variations. That and more people will be trying out "negative SEO" on their competitors because I don't see why it wouldn't work. If you can go buy 500 junk blog post links and get yourself in trouble, why couldn't a competitor do the same thing?
Even if the low quality linking schemes still work for a while, I think that it will force a lot of companies and brands to do more creative things to attract links naturally. This is how is should be done but it's more expensive, results come slower and your bosses might be breathing down your neck for results.
Doing fun and crazy things like contests, infographics, link bait, getting interviewed, real news citations and the like will not only bring on those lovely links, but the social followers that make a well balanced "brand meal". Combine that all with an amazing on site user experience and you'll not have to worry about major algo tweaks so much in the future.

I think they believe they are. It is hard to prove otherwise without having their insight and data on who was hit for what. I believe they cannot handle the perception of the negative SEO issue in the industry.

I'm not sure. It's a delicate subject that will take some time to work out, but something big and public really does get crushed by it, there will be adjustments. But otherwise I see it being something that keeps coming and going from the public opinion in the near future until something monumental happens.

Not without admitting their wrong, and I don't see that happening anytime soon. There aren't many ways out, but the ones that do correct this issue (and not flawlessly; there are still definitely some kinks to sort out) have already been suggested and ignored/shot down by someone from the big G.

Only by giving Webmasters the chance to disavow links they do not want within Webmastertools. I am surprised they rolled out the "stick" without the corresponding "carrot".

I'm not sure how easy that will be for them but they will have to look at it. As they've clearly made the move from devaluation to penalising 'bad' links it does, in theory, make negative SEO a potential issue...

I'm still not fully convinced that "negative SEO" works on real brands. I've seen it work on spam-blogs that have a very thin backlink profile, but legit companies? I've yet to see a real example, though I am completely open to it if anyone reading has some examples they would like to share.

That said, I think Google needs to be aware that this could become an issue and provide a way for webmasters to either a) cut links that they did not build (which webmasters may use to cut links that they DID build, but doesn't this also help Google by getting rid of crap links that may still be propping up rankings?), or b) provide a way for webmasters to let Google know about these links, and show the webmasters that Google is actually actively doing something about it.

There really is no "Negative SEO" issue -- not yet. If enough people talk it up I suppose it could become a PR problem for Google but the plain and simple truth is that the only real "poster boy" for recent Negative SEO (Dan Thies) was a false positive. The real reasons why his site temporarily lost some search visibility have now been explained on many Websites.

We have always had negative SEO practices. Back when Direct Hit was popular people would point click-manipulating software at their competitors' listings. They sometimes created fake doorway pages pointing to competitive Websites hoping to get those sites penalized in Altavista and Google. A couple of years ago someone directed 10s of thousands of bad links at one of my own Websites. A few years ago one of my clients called me to ask if I was responsible for 1 million links that had suddenly appeared (and Google had demoted their Website in the rankings).

There is no more negative SEO capability or incentive today than there has been in the past. But right now the wrong people are talking about negative SEO like it's something new or just became more powerful.

If spammers want to "get back" at Google by pointing toxic links at good Websites, all Google has to do is confirm with those sites that the links are hostile and not manipulative -- and then the "victims" of negative SEO become honeypots for Google to track the link networks.

So anyone who wants to use "negative SEO" really needs to understand they are pointing all their cannons at their own decks and blasting holes in their own ships. That's not a very smart strategy.

Google has a very easy way of handling Negative SEO - allow webmasters to manually disqualify links in Google Webmaster Tools. This is obviously not the perfect solution, as the perfect solution would be for Google to build an algorithm that recognizes between editorial links and links that were built in order to manipulate rankings or harm the website, but we know they don't have a great record in that field. It would even be easier if, instead of defining what links to discount, Webmasters would be able to mark the links that should count, thus not being swamped by every bozo that decides to carpet bomb their link profile with Chinese forum signatures, but I don't see this happening any time soon. In addition to being a great tool for Webmasters, it would also be a great tool for guys like me that would use the tool to experiment with value that links pass and identifying which links work and which don't and I don't think Google would want to provide us with that level of information.