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I've got a blog with some tools and business directories (https://www.webhostinghero.com). Actually my website is in English and is hosted in the US since its biggest source of traffic is from there. My second biggest traffic source is India. The issue is that while my website is really well optimized (in terms of speed), it is still slow for visitors from India. So my question is: Would it be possible to have a copy of my website on a web server located in India and use a sub-domain (ie.: in.webhostinghero.com) to access it without being penalized by Google? Would that be considered duplicate content? What would be the HREF LANG tag set to for India (EN-US, EN-GB... EN-IN??) I thought that having a sub-domain for a specific country could also help its rankings. Thanks in advance for your inputs. P.S. Sorry my english sucks.

I recently bought an SSL certificate and moved my site over to HTTPS. Now how do I make the change in Google Webmaster Tools?

I would like to know if it is possible (and beneficial) to target other countries using country-based TLDs? When visiting a company website for instance, you often get redirected to your country's site. For instance, when you visit cafepress.com from Canada, you get redirected to cafepress.ca. Since both websites (cafepress.com and cafepress.ca) have the same content, how they get away with it with no duplicate content issues?

I've got some pages that appear somewhere around #25 in Google. Every now and then, it just goes away from the top 100 results for a few days (even up to a week) and then it comes back. I've got other pages that rank around #8 which falls down to about #75 for a while and then it comes back. But while a page may be gone from the top 100 results in the US, it still ranks at about the same place everywhere else in the world (+/- 10 positions). I've seen this happen in the past but never it happened so often. What gives?!?

I just saw this link appear for my website (www.webhostinghero.com) in ahrefs.com this morning: http://freedatingsiteregistry.com/tag/website-template/ (search for text anchor "hosting reseller") Obviously it's a scraper site. Other than that, my link profile is clean. Should I disavow this?

I know there's no such thing as a perfect profile but when you're building links, do you try to maintain certain ratios such as: dofollow vs. nofollow exact match anchors vs. raw URL anchors vs. random anchors (click here, visit site, etc.) Thanks!

My website is fairly new, it was launched about 3.5 months ago. I've been publishing new content daily (except on weekends) since then. Is there any reason why new posts don't get indexed faster? All of my posts gets +1's and they're shared on G+, FB and Twitter. My website's at www.webhostinghero.com

What is the best way? Using a different domain Using a subdomain of the main site Using a folder of the main site What's your take?

I'm thinking about implementing Disqus on my blog. I'd like to know if the Disqus comments are indexed by search engines? It looks like they are displayed using Ajax or jQuery.

I bought an existing domain name on Sedo sometime ago and launched a new website on it in early June this year. I noticed there are about 5 or 6 spammy links from directories that were obviously bought by the previous domain owner but they're pointing to pages that never existed on the new website. Other than that, the link profile is 100% clean and it's quite good actually, lots of links from my content being shared on social networks. So should I be worried about these links? Like a lot of webmasters, I'd like to avoid using the disavow tool, I really don't trust that thing.

I see lots of competitors and crappy sites ranking well for highly competitive keywords in the web hosting niche. After analysing their backlinks, I noticed that most of them had only 1 or 2 backlinks to the page they wanted to rank. The anchor text is usually a slight variation of the targeted keyword. Now suppose you are able to rank well for a handful of highly lucrative keywords using very few spammy links. That would mean that even if you got a Penguin penalty, cleaning up your link profile would take an hour at most. I really have no intentions of using this strategy but it's frustrating to see spammy competitors outranking you with crappy sites and a handful of backlinks. Your thoughts?

I've got a relatively new website (launched at the beginning of June 2013). For some keywords I'm targeting, it first ranked around page 15. It made huge jumps to finally rank on page 2 or 3. Since then, it goes back to page 15 and then back to page 3. It does this every now and then. Any ideas?

I see this often for my website: Google displays my pages' H1 title instead of the document title in its search results. Is there any particular reason for this? Do we have any kind of control on this?

In OpenSiteExplorer.org, it says: "Last Mozscape index update: July 11, 2013. Next Mozscape index update: August 26, 2013" There was supposed to be an update yesterday (Aug. 8).

How often is the data supposed to be updated for our Moz campaigns? Mine have been updated on 07/15/2013 the last time. Isn't it supposed to be updated weekly?

I'd like to know if you have some ideas / advice on how to get people to share or link to user reviews pages? I mean unlike blog posts, it's more difficult to promote this kind of content. Here's an example: http://www.webhostinghero.com/reviews/inmotion-hosting/ I mean I just can't post links to the review pages on social networks, forums, whatever, that would be just plain spammy.

Apart from keyword stuffing, what is considered by Google as over-optimization? For instance, if I link from a subdomain to a page on my main domain with a keyword-rich anchor text, does it qualify as over-optimization?

I am looking for ways to gain links / visibility / traffic and so I did a little search on infographics and found this company: http://nowsourcing.com/services/infographics/ I contacted them about their services and here's a part of their reply: ====================================================
Here's a bit more information about our pricing options: level 1 - infographic design (up to 3 major revisions, 30 minor revisions) - $3,000
level 2 - infographic design + research (up to 5 hours) - $4,000
level 3 - infographic design + research + promotion (social networks plus 30+ outlets) - $5,000 **Distribution is on a few different levels:**1 - we look for top name mainstream media / large traffic / high pr websites that will run the infographic
2 - we have a media network of sites where we feature the infographic
3 - we have the ability to publish on numerous sites that feature infographics and / or are niche vertical targeted
4 - we also promote via large audiences in social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Pinterest **Here are some good examples of our artwork and promotion abilities:**Facebook vs Google Display network, www.wordstream.com/articles/facebook-vs-google-display-network
Estimated 15-20 million reach, was profiles in Adweek here - www.adweek.com/sa-article/beyond-words-142494
[...] ==================================================== Now my concern is with the distribution part. Would that be considered as spamming by Google? They seem to push the same infographic on a ton of websites. If you have better advices on infographics, please do share 🙂

Over the years, I've gathered thousands of user reviews on a website I am shutting down although I would like to keep them for another website. I removed the reviews from the old website, set the reviews pages to "noindex" and removed the pages from Google's index using the Webmaster Tools. At this point the reviews are not showing up in Google's search results anymore. Would there be any concerns about posting these reviews on a new website? Can it get penalized for duplicate content?

I know webmasters shouldn't focus on link building but unfortunately there are some types of content that doesn't get shared as much as other. And for content to go viral, it ain't that easy and it's almost impossible in some smaller niches where you don't have the volume to go "viral". That said I know about the common link building techniques. I know I can submit guest posts but when you're competing with websites that have over 10,000 backlinks, there is no way I'm going to get close to this with guest posting and commenting on other blogs. One way I found for getting backlinks is to publish interviews. Most of the time, people/businesses you interview like to link to this type of content. Publishing value-added content about other businesses' products or services may get some backlinks in return but not that often. So other than that, can some of you share some "out-of-the-box" link building strategies? Thank you in advance!

I use two subdomains on my website (news.webhostinghero.com and www.webhostinghero.com) - I know www.webhostinghero.com is not really a subdomain... That said, both subdomains are linking to each other through menus and sometimes articles. Can this cause any problem? Does Google perceive this as links from different domains / websites?

(Sorry for my english!) A quick background: I had a website at thewebhostinghero.com which had been slapped left and right by Google (both Panda & Penguin). It also had a manual penalty for unnatural links which had been lifted in late april / early may this year. I also had another domain, webhostinghero.com, which was redirecting to thewebhostinghero.com. When I realized I would be better off starting a new website than trying to salvage thewebhostinghero.com, I removed the redirection from webhostinghero.com and started building a new website. I waited about 5 or 6 weeks before putting any content on webhostinghero.com so Google had time to notice that the domain wasn't redirecting anymore. So about a month ago, I launched http://www.webhostinghero.com with 100% new content but I left thewebhostinghero.com online because it still brings a little (necessary) income. There are no links between the websites except on one page (www.thewebhostinghero.com/speed/) which is set to "noindex,nofollow" and is disallowed to search engines in robots.txt. I made sure the web page was deindexed before adding a "nofollow" link from thewebhostinghero.com/speed => webhostinghero.com/speed Since the new website launch, I've been publishing new content (from 2 to 5 posts) daily. It's getting some traction from social networks but it gets barely any clicks from Google search. It seems to take at least a week before Google indexes new posts and not all posts are indexed. The cached copy of the homepage is 12 days old. In Google Webmaster Tools, it looks like Google isn't getting the latest sitemap version unless I resubmit it manually. It's always 4 or 5 days old. So is my website just too young or could it have some kind of penalty related to the old website? The domain has 4 or 5 really old spammy links from the previous domain owner which I couldn't get rid of but otherwise I don't think there's anything tragic.

(Sorry for my english) I have lots of user reviews on my website and in some cases, there are more than a thousand reviews for a single product/service. I am looking for the best way to break down these reviews in several sub-pages. Here are the options I thought of: 1. Break down reviews into multiple pages / URL http://www.mysite.com/blue-widget-review-page1
http://www.mysite.com/blue-widget-review-page2
etc... In this case, each page would be indexed by search engines. Pros: all the reviews are getting indexed Cons: It will be harder to rank for "blue widget review" as their will be many similar pages 2. Break down reviews into multiple pages / URL with noindex + canonical tag http://www.mysite.com/blue-widget-review-page1
http://www.mysite.com/blue-widget-review-page2
etc... In this case, each page would be set to noindex and the canonical tag would point to the first review page. Pros: only one URL can potentially rank for "blue widget review" Cons: Subpages are not indexed 3. Load all the reviews into one page and handle pagination using Javascript reviews, reviews, reviews
more reviews, more reviews, more reviews
etc... Each page would be loaded in a different which would be shown or hidden using Javascript when browsing through the pages. Could that be considered as cloaking?!? Pros: all the reviews are getting indexed Cons: large page size (kb) - maybe too large for search engines? 4. Load only the first page and load sub-pages dynamically using AJAX Display only the first review page on initial load. I would use AJAX to load additional reviews into the . It would be similar to some blog commenting systems where you have to click on "Load more comments" to see all the comments. Pros: Fast initial loading time + faster loading time for subpages = better user experience Cons: Only the first review page is indexed by search engines ========================================================= My main competitor who's achieving great rankings (no black hat of course) is using technique #3. What's your opinion?

One of my website has been heavily hit by Google's entire zoo so I decided to phase it out while building a new one. Old website: www.thewebhostinghero.com
New website: www.webhostinghero.com Now the thing is that both websites are obviously similar since I kept the branding. They also both have content about the same topics. No content has been copied or spinned or whatever though. Everything's original on both websites. There were only 3 parts of both websites that were too similar in terms of functionalities so I "noindexed" it on the old website. Now it seems that Google doesn't want you to have multiple websites for the same business just for the sake of occupying more space in the search results. This can especially be detected by the websites' C block. I am not sure if this is myth or fact though. So do you think I'm in a problematic situation with this scenario? It's getting ridiculous all you have to watch for when building a website, I'm afraid to touch my keyboard in fear my websites will get penalized! Sorry for my english btw.

I finally decided to drop my website after it kept losing traffic even though I spent hundreds of hours and lots of $$$ trying to recover from both Panda and Penguin. I should've started a new website a lot earlier. So here's my new website, let me know if it's worthy of Big G: http://www.webhostinghero.com/ Thank you in advance for your constructive comments!

I've got a website that has lots of valuable content and tools but it's been hit too hard by both Panda and Penguin. I came to the conclusion that I'd be better off with a new website as this one is going to hell no matter how much time and money I put in it. Had I started a new website the first time it got hit by Penguin, I'd be profitable today. I'd like to move some of that content to this other domain but I don't want to do 301 redirects as I don't want to pass bad link juice. I know I'll lose all links and visitors to the original website but I don't care. My only concern is duplicate content. I was thinking of setting the pages to noindex on the original website and wait until they don't appear in Google's index. Then I'd move them over to the new domain to be indexed again. Do you see any problem with this? Should I rewrite everything instead? I hate spinning content...!

I have a website on which I publish lots of news (sometimes up to 10 posts per day). I have a feeling that somewhat it is diluting the density of some keywords I am targeting. By using subdomains, would I avoid diluting keyword density too much? Of course, I am talking about a reasonable use of subdomains (maybe 1 or 2). What's your opinion?

If I'm using a subdomain on my website, for instance news.mywebsite.com, and it gets penalized by Panda (or whatever animal update), would that affect the main domain and/or other subdomains?

Can it hurt your website if there are thousands of links to your website from multiple websites with identical content? Is there a right way to use PR for SEO?

As you can see, there are 2 results for the same page. One is the correct page URL, the other has the Feedburner parameters at the end: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/improving-user-engagement-with-the-right-blog-commenting-system.html http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/improving-user-engagement-with-the-right-blog-commenting-system.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thewebhostinghero+(TheWebHostingHero.com) Can this cause duplicate content issues? Can I prevent Google from indexing my Feedburner links? My Feedburner settings are already set to noindex, what else can I do?!? 22cfThX.png

I have lots of news on my website and unlike other types of content, news posts quickly become obsolete and get a high bounce rate. I have reasons to think that the news on my website might be partly responsible for a Panda penalty so I'm not sure. There are over 400 news posts on the blog from the last 4 years so that's still a lot of content. I was thinking of isolating the news articles on a subdomain (news.mywebsite.com) If the news play a part in the Panda penalty, would that remove it from the main domain?

Just got this: Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www. We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www. for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated ourquality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site. Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue. Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

I just noticed that for lots of the articles on my website, there are two results in Google's index. For instance: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html and http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thewebhostinghero+(TheWebHostingHero.com) Now my Feedburner feed is set to "noindex" and it's always been that way. The canonical tag on the webpage is set to: rel='canonical' href='http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html' /> The robots tag is set to: name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp" /> I found out that there are scrapper sites that are linking to my content using the Feedburner link. So should the robots tag be set to "noindex" when the requested URL is different from the canonical URL? If so, is there an easy way to do this in Wordpress?

I know I've asked a similar question in the past but I'm still trying to figure out what to do with my website. I've got a website at thewebhostinghero.com that's been penalized by both Panda and Penguin. I cleaned up the link profile and submitted a reconsideration request but it was denied. I finally found a handful of additional bad links and I submitted a new disavow + reconsideration request a few days ago and I am still waiting. That said, after submitting the initial disavow request, the traffic has completely gone and while I expected a drop in traffic, I also expected my penalty to be lifted but it was not the case. Even though the penalty might be lifted this time, I think that making the website profitable again could be harder than creating a new website. So here's my questioning: The website's domain is thewebhostinghero.com but I also happen to own webhostinghero.com which I bought later for $5000 (yes you read that right). The domain "webhostinghero.com" is completely clean as it's only redirecting to thewebhostinghero.com. I would like to use webhostinghero.com as a completely new website and not redirect any traffic from thewebhostinghero.com as to not pass any bad link juice. Pros: Keeping the same branding image (which cost me $$$) Keeping the 17,000+ Facebook followers Keeping the same Google+ and Twitter accounts Keeping and monetizing a domain that cost me $5000 webhostinghero.com is a better domain than thewebhostinghero.com Cons: Will create confusion between the 2 websites Any danger of being flagged as duplicate or something? Do you see any other potential issues with this? What's your opinion/advice? P.S. Sorry for my english...

I've got lots of news posts on my blog. There is nothing wrong with the news posts themselves but older posts do get lower CTR and higher bounce rates. I was considering moving the older news to a subdomain (ie.: archive.mywebsite.com) and do a 302 redirect for each post. What do you think?

Until yesterday, my website had about 1200 pages indexed in Google. I did lots of changes: removed low quality content, rewrote passable content to make it better, wrote high quality content, got lots of likes and shares on social networks, etc. Now this morning I see that out of 1252 pages submitted, only 691 are indexed. Is that a temporary situation related to the recent updates? Anyone seeing this? What should I interpret about this?

I got lots of 404 errors due to the fact that I removed some crappy content. Do I need to worry about this? I know eventually they will go away when Google crawls the whole website and doesn't find any more links to those pages.

As my site has definitely got hit by Panda, I am in the process of cleaning my website of low quality content. Needless to say, shitty articles are completed being removed but I think lots of this content is now of low quality because it is obsolete and dated. So what should I do with this content? Should I rewrite those articles as completely new posts and link from the old posts to the new ones? Or should I delete the old posts and do a 301 redirect to the new post? Or should I rewrite the content of these articles in place so I can keep the old URL and backlinks? One thing is that I've got a lot more followers than I used to so publishing a new post gets a lot more views, like and shares and whatnot from social networks.

I'm going through all the links (hopefully) to my website and I've found so many links from site scrapers. For instance: http://www.fzccg.com/cmsteam/dvbbs/boke.asp?zkhod76681.showtopic.148760.html ... which links to my site with anchor text "abercrombie uk How To Change Your Wiper Blades" It is surely not realistic to think that I can contact all the scraper site owners. So what should I do with this kind of links?

About 2 months ago, I published a press release through PRWEB with a link back to my website of course. Now it must have been one of those morning where the coffee wasn't strong enough as my website already has a Penguin penalty I'm trying to get lifted. The intent wasn't to spam the web but rather to gain some traction in the business hosting world. Like I've said, the coffee must've been too weak that morning as it didn't even cross my mind to see if I could "nofollow" the links in the press release. I just hit the submit button... As I'm in the process of submitting a disavow links request to Google, I'm wondering if I should include the URLs to copies of those press releases? I mean, there's no way I can find all those links as it was submitted not long ago. Google and link tools will keep discovering other copies of the PR for months to come probably.

I was reading this page here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356 "[...]Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link." So assuming you provide high quality guest posts to high quality blogs, is it okay or not to use this method as a link building technique?

Please post constructive comments about my website: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com Some of the stuff you may want to look at: Free tools: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/free-tools Web host lookup: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/who_is_hosting.php Articles, news, tutorials: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/blog Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WebHostingHero I'm still weighting the option of building a new website and if I do, I want to make sure I won't do the same mistakes again. Don't be scared to be brutal... but constructive. Thank you Stephane

My website has been hit by a Google Penguin penalty. At this point, it seems very few websites have recovered from this penalty even after it was lifted. That said, I'm still wondering if I should start a new website or my current one to another domain. When I started my website, I registered the domain name http://www.thewebhostinghero.com A few years later, I bought webhostinghero.com as it became available. Actually, webhostinghero.com redirects traffic to thewebhostinghero.com at the registrar level. There are barely any links pointing to webhostinghero.com. TheWebHostingHero.com is quite a big website with over 1400 pages and some very useful tools (http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/free-tools) that took me so long to develop, I just can't believe I'd have to throw it all out the window. So that said, do you think it would be possible to move all or some of the content from thewebhostinghero.com to webhostinghero.com? Would that make sense? Would webhostinghero.com come out as a copy of thewebhostinghero.com since the domain is similar, etc.? Of course, moving the content from thewebhostinghero.com to webhostinghero.com would have to be done without any 301/302 redirects to avoid passing bad link juice. At the same time, I don't want to end up with duplicate content on both domains.

I've been using Link Detox from linkresearchtools.com against the list of back links provided in my GWT account although it seems it is not enough. What tools are the best at identifying toxic links?

2 weeks ago, I submitted a disavow links request to Google and I was quite sure I did a great job at cleaning the links. I won't go into detail about how I did it but let's say that I reviewed manually each link that didn't get flagged as toxic by Link Detox. At the same time, I submitted a reconsideration request explaining what I did and mentioning that I submitted a list of links to disavow. I never got any reply about the disavow links request but I got my reconsideration request denied today: ========================================== Dear site owner or webmaster of ... We received a request from a site owner to reconsider ... for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results. If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team ========================================== Should've I waited to get some kind of reply about the disavow link list before submitting the reconsideration request? Also I see links from scrappers increasing exponentially lately and I mean I get a sh*load of bad links from them with random anchor text gibberish. Do they expect me to include these links too?

Since April 2012, my website impressions has dropped about 88% according to GWT. Every other month or so, the impressions are dropping by about 30%. My total traffic (visitors, not impressions) has dropped by about 25% but now I am getting lots of junk traffic. A few of the major keywords I used to rank for are still ranking in the top 10 but only in the USA. Lots of the keywords have gone to page 2 or 3 in the US and are gone to hell in other countries. Now I know I'm mostly responsible for this mess. About 3 years ago, I hired a freelancer to write news for my blog and she did a great job for quite some time so I stopped monitoring her work for duplicated content. Unfortunately, she started to provide me with copied content after a while and did so for almost 9 months before I noticed it. I had also hired RankPoop - errr I mean RankPop - to build some backlinks and that eventually got me in trouble too. I got an unnatural links warning in GWT in July 2012. Since then, I had more than 50% of the bad links taken down. There are still lots of them but they sure account for way less than 50% of all the backlinks. I have not submitted a reconsideration request yet as I haven't compensate for all the links taken down yet. I also started adding LOTS of fresh, unique and useful content to the website. I've added near 400 articles (sometimes up to 7 or 8 articles a day) over the last 5 months. I've also set lots of the duplicated posts to "noindex" and when they're not indexed anymore, I completely removed them in order to avoid any copyright issues (some were 100% identical to the source). I keep doing this gradually to avoid 404 errors. In early March of this year, I did a complete redesign of the site. The navigation structure stayed the same and visually, the layout is quite the same although the graphical elements are much more professional and the site is much faster. As much as I would've like to avoid a complete redesign, major technical issues from the previous design (and development platform) was now forcing me to do so. Unfortunately, I updated the website design right before the last Panda update so now I don't know if the recent traffic lost is due to the new design or because of Panda... or both. Google is like a police officer who repeatedly give you tickets for the same offense, yet they won't tell you what that offense is. My website is located at http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/ Any advice is welcomed. P.S. sorry for my english, I speak french.

I've tried to contact the staff through the online form at http://www.articlesfactory.com/contact.html but never got any reply. Any idea?

I have some keywords ranking in pages 2 and 3 in the US but for instance, in Canada, the same keywords rank somewhere between pages 15 and 25. When I check my US rankings, I use a Windows VPS located in the US. When I check my rankings in Canada, I use a computer physically located in Canada. Basically, about 80% of my rankings have gone away for countries other than the US. I have not set any geographical target for my website in GWT. How come there is such a big difference in search results across different countries?

I used to rank for some keywords now I've been outranked by crappy websites. But what amazes me most is that among the top 10 results for a particular keyphrase, 3 of these results point to websites that are no longer online! Worst than that, these websites have to backlinks! So how come 404 pages / non-existing websites rank higher than I do? Is Google loosing it or are they trying to create so much confusion in the hope that website owners will turn to Adwords?

Since the Panda update from December 21st, 2012, some of the keywords I used to rank for are now gone beyond page 20. What I don't get is that the websites that are now ranking are definitely full of crap and they have tons of unnatural links pointing to them. I've analysed their backlink profiles and most of them have only exact keyword match anchors pointing to them. So what's going on? Is buying tons of crappy links still a valid tactic? I know it is not but how come thoses sites outrank me? I mean it happened to LOTS of my keywords. I don't get it...