I have never had
issues ranking sites and never been penalized at least not bad enough to
think a ranking drop was a penalty.  Ive used automation tools, Ive
used pbn’s sort of anyways. But when I do that stuff I take the time to
create value in my “spam”.  The only time I can remember truly cheating
(although the site was legit) was back when you could change text to
your background color and I ranked in webcrawler and metacrawler for
computers and electronics (the broad terms) it was the first site I did
seo on and I was just messing around for a roommates site.  If i only
saw  how valuable that was (I think 1997 or 98).

My
point with the above paragraph is that even though I got the site ranked
number one overall, there were still non spammy sites in the top ten,
and definitely top twenty. Back then people actually looked at page 2 in
the search results. So even back then it was better to have a great
site than junk. Yes many sites got ad revenue and people clicked their
adsense ads but often people used to go back and check out search
results 8-10 and remember when it was better to be the top two on page 2
then mixed into the bottom middle of the first page?
What
google has done is make spammers better contributors and made the total
web more productive.  As well as allow people to now only click the top
few links to find what they want.  Sometimes they don’t even need to
click any results (ehhhhh not sure how that will go lol)Again
another great podcast.  Oh a quick jab I think you meant crazy fox
news  (ebola gate, ground all the planes, world war z, zombie
apocalypse) as someone with a large interest in biotech I watch both
sides one cnn abc are probably a little to easy on it while fox is
claiming the end of the world. Its somewhere in the middle really.