Depending on the industry you are targeting the penalty not on varies from industry to industry there were lot of others factor resides behind this.

Factors like free for all links, big meta tags stuffed with the keywords and invisible text. Austin was getting smarter and better. due to the inclusion of Hilltop Algorithm. In combination with the Page Rank algorithm that Google has been using since 1998, these two algos work in tandem in what is supposed to be producing better, more relevant search results.

Google's new "weapons of mass destruction". Google developed a unique way to find sites that attempt to use spam techniques or certain methods that were forbidden by most major search engines.

The cloaking spamming techniques was in trend for black hats To rectify this critical situation, on Jan. 25 Google changed the IP addresses of most of its data centers all over the world, in an effort to combat such abused techniques.

Irrelevant meta tags that developed only to make SEs fool and not from the visitors point of view got the penalty. The title tag which doesnot mention about the particular page comes in penalty. Content that is freshly and regularly updated always helps in getting better rankings. On the web, quality content is always king.

Additionally, Google's Hilltop Algorithm has a power to detect sites that are authoritative in their field and will usually rank them higher, along with a higher PR value. Hilltop looks at the topic of the theme and who links to a site, the value of those links and the anchor text surrounding those links, as well as the text in the links themselves.

"Overall in the Austin Update Google change its DCs and give penalty a a gift to the sites linked from FFA "