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Hi there - Tawny from Moz's Help Team here. This is something we'd love to help you out with! If you write in to help@moz.com or use our Contact Form with your question, we should be able to help get things straightened out!

Hey James, Thanks for starting this discussion. While I don't have stats on the number of businesses being 'caught', I do think it's a good thing that Yelp is willing to show proof to back up their decision to take action against a spamming business. I like transparency and some of the examples being featured in posts about this are totally outrageous. Business owners who want to fake reviews are starting out on such a wrong foot in rep management that an experience like being caught by Yelp could actually be doing these folks a huge favor. It may be one of those hard but vital lessons to learn.

SEW is under new ownership. I submitted a post a couple of weeks ago for my monthly column and the majority of the links in my post were nofollowed by SEW.  I wrote to the new editor to ask why and they reviewed the links and decided the the one that I had included that linked to my own site did contribute to the conversation well, so they removed the nofollow.  I had also mentioned Alan Bleiweiss in my article and out of courtesy, linked to his site.  (It bugs me when people mention someone and then link to their Twitter profile...if they're good enough to mention, why not give them a link?)  They would not remove the nofollow on that link. I think that publications like Search Engine Watch, Moz and other high quality sites that accept user generated content have to be really careful about how they link out. Personally, if SEW told me that all of my links would now be nofollowed, I'd likely keep publishing there as I do get business as a result of my articles.  But, I am guessing that there are quite a few authors that would stop submitting articles to them. I think this is a case where a few bad apples spoil the lot. I bet you the new editors reviewed some article submissions and saw that people were using SEW as a platform to link out. If SEW got an outbound link penalty that would not be good...so they might have gone a little over to the side of caution in making nofollow decisions.  With that said, it looks like they have now edited the article you quoted to go ahead and allow followed links.  I also checked a few other articles and didn't see any excessive nofollowing so maybe they've loosened up a little.