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"<p dir=\"auto\">As I am continually sizing up my competition in the SERPS I have scanned their sites with a fine tooth and comb. I have found that these sites practice in the very things that I have practiced in the past and have removed thinking that may be some of the reasons I was hit with Penguin.</p>\n<p dir=\"auto\">Some of these factors are:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Link Scheme with sites they own (C Blocks)</li>\n<li>Content for Search Engines (Keyword rich text)</li>\n<li>Exact anchor text in back linking profile</li>\n</ul>\n<p dir=\"auto\">Yet even though my competition practices in these methods (One site even places exact anchor text in the footer and header of every page for one of their other forum site) they seem to have not even been touched with any of the recent updates. In fact it seems their ranking have increased.</p>\n<p dir=\"auto\">In scanning these sites the only major difference that I have been able to see between them and I is that their SERPS are higher than mine and they have way more social signals than me. One site has about 73k facebook likes where I only have about 300.</p>\n<p dir=\"auto\">My question is Can Google ignore penalties for sites that have higher SERPS and /or social signals that would effect another site that had lower ones?</p>\n<p dir=\"auto\">My other question is related to back links</p>\n<p dir=\"auto\">My main site has links from another site I built a long time ago (Pre SEO and not knowing what I was doing) somewhere in the 73k range. Obviously a HUGE signal to Google that this might be spam and I am aware. I have removed the links from that site but unfortunately the average crawl rate per day is very low so it is taking a very long time for Google to find those pages and re-crawl them to find the links gone. Since that site I have than has those links pointing to my main site has very low traffic I am totally willing to kill that entire site with a 404. Can this help speed up the removal of those links from that site? I figure since the site no longer exists all links from that site will be removed almost immediately from my main site.</p>\n<p dir=\"auto\">Any thoughts?</p>\n"
<https://moz.com/community/q/topic/25634/can-high-serps-and-or-social-signals-minimize-google-penalties-and-a-back-linking-removal-question/3>