"I read this article on New York times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?_r=2&scp=2&sq=jc+penny&st=cse

I wanted to know if this will effect using SEO Link Vine and our rankings.
Will we be penalized too like JC Penny if caught?"

Wow, great article! Thanks!

And this is what I have experienced, when a company gets caught as JC Penny did. There is a manual review and questionable links are taken out as the questionable sites are de-indexed. Thus killing the sites in the network, not the receiving site and returning the receiving site back to what rankings it would of had without the boosters.

If Google were to "punish" a site for offensive linking, then we could easily take out our competition.

Hope that helps.

thanks,
Dori

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Is this service black hat?

I was curious if you think a network like yours will stay safe from getting reported to google as webspam? Have you ever had experiences when you suspected that your network was discovered?