2012 Gambling Mid-Year Report

Penguin Kills Link Exchanges
Anyone who’s been at the affiliate marketing game for length of time has likely invested time and money in building paid link exchange networks. This spring much of that hard work went out the window when Google introduced its new Penguin update.
Penguin severely punished sites that utilized a range of link building methods like paid exchanges and links to poor quality sites. This latest update came just a year after Google’s Panda update. Panda cracked down on low quality content, so Penguin shouldn’t have come as too big a surprise.
The message from Google was sent loud and clear, organic link building is the future, no matter what you were used to doing.