1) Google massively discounted exact match domains, so if you were ranking well before because of an EMD, don't expect to now.
2) Negative SEO has always been a possibility, but a lot of sites aren't helping themselves either.
For like a decade now, there have been plenty of shady link networks where you could get millions of links. It would not be difficult to get millions of spam links with the same anchor text and make it look like Blue Widgets was spamming.
It's not important whether a link is spammy or not, it matters if it's helping you rank better, is being discounted, or if it's penalizing you.
It is possible that those links existed before the Google updates and were helping blue widgets.com rank better. Then Google discounted the spammy links and the EMD, and now the site isn't ranking.
It's also possible that Google is penalizing those links.
In the end, spam links don't come with a great big attribution of how they got there, who put them there, and what the intent is.
A link is a vote. Just like votes, you can stuff the ballot box or you can make it look like your competitor is stuffing the ballot box.
In the end nobody is entitled to rank well on Google search for any reason at all. They could order by rand() tomorrow and you're up a creek.
1) Google massively discounted exact match domains, so if you were ranking well before because of an EMD, don't expect to now.
2) Negative SEO has always been a possibility, but a lot of sites aren't helping themselves either.
For like a decade now, there have been plenty of shady link networks where you could get millions of links. It would not be difficult to get millions of spam links with the same anchor text and make it look like Blue Widgets was spamming.
It's not important whether a link is spammy or not, it matters if it's helping you rank better, is being discounted, or if it's penalizing you.
It is possible that those links existed before the Google updates and were helping blue widgets.com rank better. Then Google discounted the spammy links and the EMD, and now the site isn't ranking.
It's also possible that Google is penalizing those links.
In the end, spam links don't come with a great big attribution of how they got there, who put them there, and what the intent is.
A link is a vote. Just like votes, you can stuff the ballot box or you can make it look like your competitor is stuffing the ballot box.
In the end nobody is entitled to rank well on Google search for any reason at all. They could order by rand() tomorrow and you're up a creek.