Google penalizing sites because of press release pages?

[joemas99]

Does anyone know of situations i can look up where Google penalized a site because of press release pages (hosted on a non owned major site like prweb or whatever), where the prweb page obtained back links from a group of sites that Google felt was part of a "farm"?

[RyanPurkey]

That would be a pretty tricky case to chronicle, let alone find several situations like that. If forced to try and dig through those dregs though, I would do a search like this: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=viagra+site%3Aprweb.com or some other SPAM term + site:prweb.com (or other major news site) and start mining the back links of the articles in OSE.

Personally I haven't heard of this exact case, and someone trying this much manipulation probably has other areas where Google could say, "Oh, we penalized them because of reason XYZ, ABC was unrelated." Even though ABC could be a part of it.

[joemas99]

Thanks, i will see what I can come up with, in the meantime I'll make sure any links to press releases or squidoo, and the like will be clean....