Q: Are spammers still getting around it with private link networks?
Spammers or SEOs in general (remember that SEO is about pushing rankings and influencing Googles results? Google tends to call them Spammers, not to confuse with E-Mail spammers) have always been trying and testing with “private link networks” and will continue to do so.

The success will depend on how good those networks are setup. One popular off-label use for Link Detox from aggressive SEOs is actually to “proof” their networks and reduce the number of factors found in unnatural link networks with it.

Q: How will the real spammy sites be affected (or benefited) by the little “Pengy 4.0“?
The “real spammy” varies on a level from “not spammy in Google’s, but user’s eyes” to “very aggressive link spam”. Many SEOs will benefit from the faster responses and higher granularity, which both allow SEO tests to work better.

Q: Everybody talks about the "real time" factor of the new Penguin. But, what about the more granularity? Will toxic links be less contagious?
We assume that for massive spamming actions still whole site penalties are possible. After all, “whole domain” is also a granularity, similar to page-level or directory level. Luckily Link Detox supports all of those granularities already since 2014.

Q: As Google Penguin targets websites with a number of unnatural links, wouldn't this be a great opportunity for Negative and Black Hat SEOs?
Black Hat SEO used to be only spamming and jamming, sometimes hacking websites.
Google also refers to Black Hat SEO as building unnatural links from artificial networks or private blog networks. These are more aggressive SEO strategies that worked before 2012. If today, you would build a highly artificial link network for a subpage and this subpage would suddenly drop in rankings, you will see that you have overdone it.
When referring to the spamming and jamming towards competitors, then yes, this will just get bigger and bigger now.If you now you get a faster response on link spam, that opens a whole new set of opportunities and risks. This is why we recommend running a Link Detox report on a regular basis. In very aggressive markets, maybe even on a daily basis.

Q: If intruder site A links to my website but to a non-existent page, does this create a "Bad Backlink" in my database?
Since the site links to an error or 404 page, this will probably not affect your rankings. For all the good links to error or 404 pages, we have the Link Juice Recovery Tool. This tool finds links going to 404 pages, which you can redirect to existing pages to recover link power and trust.

Q: Have you seen a successful Negative SEO attack?
In the future, we will see many partial penalties, and we expect to see many Negative SEO attacks focused on Subpages or Subfolders. We’ve seen Negative SEO attacks in the past. Our LRT Certified Professional Ashley Turner wrote a case study about a Google Penalty and Negative SEO attack recovery. Read the full case study on our blog.