WebProNews

Cutts said:

The short answer is that Aaron obtained and promoted a domain in ways that Google considers blackhat, then combined/intertwined that spammy domain with a more legitimate domain. When Google detected the stuff that we considered spam, we took action against both domains.

My takeaway advice for anyone in a similar situation is “Don’t mix your blackhat networks with your whitehat sites.” I’ll tell a couple anecdotes to illustrate that:

It is tough out there.

Google is trying to maintain relevant search results, remove pay for link juice, devalue blog spam links and others, and reciprocals.

In many high profile niches this is failing miserably. They are successful in some ways and this is one of the things that makes it so tough to see fairness.

You flat can't compete in certain areas of the web without buying links and engaging in schemes to get links that have nothing to do with link love.

I would love to see some success in the adsense scraper spam sites infecting the index too....