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You wont get notified by Google if you are hit by a Penguin (the beak marks in your shins will tell you instead). Have a look at your link profile, use Opensite Explorer but also check your Google webmasters account. Look at the link profile, not just the variation in anchor text and the number of sites linking to you but also the number of pages. We've seen an account that looked perfectly natural until you see the one directory listing (designed to be from one page) that actually resulted in over 10 000 links from dynamic pages - that is unnatural!

The age of the site and authority of the site is also very important. If your competition have an old site and the five back links are of a really high quality, that may very well outweigh  your back links. However, if the site is well respected and old, has great content and offers visitors the answers to their search combined with keywords in their URL, they will be very strong!

You wont get notified by Google if you are hit by a Penguin (the beak marks in your shins will tell you instead). Have a look at your link profile, use Opensite Explorer but also check your Google webmasters account. Look at the link profile, not just the variation in anchor text and the number of sites linking to you but also the number of pages. We've seen an account that looked perfectly natural until you see the one directory listing (designed to be from one page) that actually resulted in over 10 000 links from dynamic pages - that is unnatural!