A killer plan for top rankings everywhere, or bad idea?

[jmcnealy]

A few of months ago, I noticed that www.mesolink.org was ranked no. one for the keyword "mesothelioma". So I go to Yahoo and do a quick backlink search on that domain. It turns out that most of the links for that domain were from counter scripts that pointed back to www.mesolink.org! Thousands of links and most of them from some free utility script. Needless to say, I filed that bit of info away for later use. However, lately I have noticed that www.mesolink.org no longer ranks for "mesothelioma", or for many of its other keywords. Is it because of compitition, changes to the index at Google (Yahoo still likes them), or they were outed as link spammers? What do you guys think?

[jmcnealy]

Also, what would this mean for article and rss feed links? Any thoughts?

[jmcnealy]

I just checked www.mesolink.org in www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports/ (a great tool by the way) and it looks like Google has shot this site down hard. Still ranked for Yahoo and MSN though. The question in my mind is still this: is this a case of Google stopping a link spammer, or a case of something else (like footer links having less value).