This is a quick post, but I’ve heard a lot about this recently and whilst http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/interflora-what-really-happened.html offers some interesting information on the matter and I’m hugely inclined to agree that the volume of advertorials here was just insane. That is NOT the only cause.

The fact is their backlink profile was pretty poor anyway. See below

I’ve been training some newbies in the office this week to help with a particularly colossal link removal job that we inherited. And now it’s out there in the open that bad links hurt domains and yet a lot of webmasters still don’t get it.

A lot of the people we contact seem to think that their spammy network of directories is helping our sites rankings and not hurting them. And many webmasters are still paying for the awful services of those who place them to begin with.