[galenward]

Here's the likely real story: LifeShield bought tens of thousands of links to improve their SEO (made sense on a 6-basis, less sense on a 2-3 year basis) and got hit hard by a recent update.

I helped a company a few years ago that had paid a consultant to purchase tens of thousands of links. The way they did it was by buying one of three slots on a few different freely-downloadable wordpress and forum themes.

The problem with buying links like this is that once they're purchased, they are out of your control (buying links is pretty much always a bad idea, but 10x more so like this).

Yes, competitors could have bought tens of thousands of links, but let's apply Occam's Razor here:

- Did an angry competitor spends a ton of money on the off chance that they can swamp LifeShield an SEO penalty (risky - could go the other way)

OR

- Did a company that has purchased tons of spammy Twitter followers (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3970998) and pay referral fees to people who review their products (and link to them) also buy tons of spammy links?

[Geewhipped]

Thank you for being the one to toss this out there... I also feel this is a strong possibility but I didn't want to be the one to say it.