There are a few Black Hat communities discussing and complaining about ranking drops for some of their web sites over the past 24 hours. The public one is at Black Hat World and it shares that the ranking drops at Google started last night.
It seems the early consensus is that Google has issued ranking penalties for web sites participating in link schemes. Specifically, some are calling out the SAPE link network, which Google already slapped back in March 2013.
Several webmasters that use SAPE said that they noticed huge ranking drops for those web sites in Google. They said the only differentiator between the sites that dropped in rankings and those that are still ranking are that the ones that dropped uses SAPE links.
I believe now they are working on removing the SAPE links.
The interesting thing is that none have received manual actions in their Google Search Console, yet. They may see a manual action in the future or maybe this is related to Google's hacked sites algorithm or maybe more likely, this is about the warning to repeat violators where Google may be harsher with them in the future?
Forum discussion at Black Hat World.
