Better to have a "bad" long term strategy than no short term strategy at all.
Matt you know very well that small businesses that want to compete now HAVE to acquire some non-donated links, as NO ONE is donating dofollow links anymore, yet you still use them in your algorithm.
When and if you start to ignore links because you have enough usage and social signals, great! But this is a couple years off no? So other than them getting a penalty, which is a risk they just have to take, they have no choice but to acquire some non-donated links that look donated.
I'm hoping someone from Google can explain, or at least commit to investigate why the leading brand in our niche (travel) has escaped a Penguin 2.0 demotion. It may come across as sour grapes as yes, we were demoted following Penguin 2, due to links built by an SEO agency in 2008 that we have tried (pre-pengiun) to have removed for years, despite passing a manual link review and having a manual penalty removed, the algorithm clearly has no discretion and re-penalised us for the same issue, however the fact remains that the largest brand, a household name, in our niche is engaging in far worse and at a much greater scale and continues to do so that has left them top of the pile for a huge number of very lucrative search terms.
Here is just a small sample of paid links, paid blog posts and article submissions clearly designed to manipulate the SERP's that are no doubt paying huge dividends for them. Isn't it about time Google stepped in and stopped these brands being so well protected, whether it be from manual or algorithmic penalties. We've been watching their dominance in the travel market for 2-3 years now and assumed that one day Google would take a look but so far nothing and now we are in a position where we are laying off staff due to factors outside of our control (and accepted by the search quality team), whilst the largest and most active spammy link buyers in our niche go from strength to strength.
Algorithmic penalties could be already in place for this domain. I would be surprised if google places any weight on these type of links you posted. However due to their overall activity they may be getting a lot genuine stuff their way too, which could be a reason why they still rank above others in this "black-grey-heavy" industry.
I hear what you are saying, but if a site can rank position 1 for almost all relevant search terms with an algorithmic penalty then clearly the penalty is not severe enough. They really have our niche by the balls so I can't believe there is a penalty. It's disheartening to know that google simply will not acknowledge this. We've reported on WMF a few times and made various other attempts to make them aware of this blatant 'cheating'. Why can't they (Cutts himself viewed this thread) at least say what you have said. "They have a penalty, but we still rank them higher than everyone else" or as is more likely the case "they are a HUGE adwords customer so we wouldn't want to upset them". It stinks.
