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Yes but we need to remember that the 100 links limit is very arbitrarily. Some sites can have less than 100 links on a page while other can have thousands and still being crawled. It really comes down to the authority of the website.

The domains in question were all previously owned by me in my webmaster tools account long before this happened. I've since gone and put in an address change request for the site that has the 301s on it to point to the new site. I'm feeling like I got stuck with a false positive here, but it is taking forever to get re-reviewed. Of course, it is grilling season now, so I'm losing tens of thousands of dollars in revenue per day that we are out of the index. I realize the answer is probably no, but does anyone have any tips on how to speed up the review process? I could lose a quarter million dollars over the course of a week or two.

I have seen stuff like that in the SERP's but the only experience I have of getting hacked is a bit different. I worked in-house for a large travel corporation a couple of years ago and whilst the company's site was fine, their very popular blog wasn't. I just started there and looked at the source code of the blog (for some reason nobody was ever checking that) and found that there were hundreds of links to porn and poker sites hidden by CSS. It was all down to the fact that the blog was on Wordpress and hadn't been updated for a while. Other than that, we've had sites we host hacked a few times, from hidden links to malware on the sites which of course produced warnings in the browsers. Again, all down to not keeping up with security patches and other updates. I learnt some lessons there.

That's strange, but I'm not sure it's cloaking. Looks like they are using Javascript to display the product as part of a larger display. If JavaScript is disabled, the product just shows without the larger display of other products around it.

I have over 250,000 links into my site that I did not ask for, did not buy, and frankly, do not want. Some are from pages covered with links, some are from what look like "normal" websites. I'm afraid these crazy links are going to destroy my credibility with google. My site has been up since 1997, and I've never had anything like this happen before. If I follow your argument correctly, you are saying that I should be blacklisted? But I did nothing NOTHING to get these links in. There are links from about sixty sites into my site - links I asked for and from high quality sites. The rest are all just there, I had nothing to do with it. Any expertise you could offer would be deeply appreciated. I wake up having nightmares about these links.

Again, it depends on how bots see your page. If a bot is based in, say, San Francisco, are you going to feed it SF localized results? Again, a thorough site map and site index (XML) should ensure that all content is spidered

In sifting through these two sites, I have also discovered one other thing. I checked their ISP neighborhoods and looked at shared domains to see how they were indexing. So far, almost all sites in the same neighborhood are not indexing. Could a bad ISP neighborhood by default bring your domain down?

The fact they don't "own" the location doesn't matter.  Many small businesses don't "own" the locations, they are leased.  I'll bet the client in this case leases space to hold their training classes.  It would be appropriate to to have a places listing for each location.  In the addresses they can just create arbitrary suite numbers to indicate that they may not be the ONLY business in that "place."

Good to hear that all your rankings have recovered. How have things gone the past couple of weeks, do you have anything you can share here? Or maybe even for a YOUmoz post?

I am with you.  Seems sneaky since it's not to combat duplicate content. Thank you for the validation. 

Yes, I know how each one of those methods work.  What I was getting at was the fact that the links are all essentially the same in that they are generally on low quality pages and the end result is proliferating duplicate content throughout the web.  The Autoblogging tools I'm familiar with utilize RSS feeds or other data feeds (that someone else has "syndicated") to publish content. I suppose syndicating content would be effective if you're content is great and you are a well known blogger, like Rand!

Yes, Keywords with low Competion can be pushed to the top Ranks of Google via Forum(Spamlinks) with no related content whatsoever. Exact Keyword Targeting is quite powerful, even though Google wants everyone to believe it is not The other Thing to take in account is if you will be punished from Google for it. In My Option.... if you dont use Scripts to post your spam links :>, buy 10k Links, and dont get all your Links in 1 week, Google wont punish .... if you have like 100 Links a week.