Im running a couple of case studies at the moment using thehoth seo service. A few of my sites got death notes. The effect was on over optimised keywords, 30 days after receipt of my notices I incurred a -50 SERP penalty against those keywords. I am currently optimising 15 keywords on one affected site using theHOTH service with a mixture of valuable and benign keyword variations in at attempt to neutralise the footprint and avert the need to contact Google. Yes I tried that for one site and nothing good came from it. I even tried pleading with Google claiming my children would starve. It did not good and I the site was slapped. Case study 2 involves changing the URL, meeting he same content and starting the seo process again. Will know more in 3 weeks :))
Couple of questions. Are you familiar with -50 / -100 slaps? Are you familiar with negative SEO?
@tomewer @Jeffrey Trull
I started following your blog about two months ago and you inspired me. I'm now working towards quitting my job. I started experimenting with fiverr SEO gigs after the downfall of BMR/Rank Jumpers and wasn't overly impressed. It seems you get what you pay for with SEO. I've since invested some savings into testing different packages advertised on wickedfire and similar sites and the results are a lot more promising.
I'm a few weeks away from launching my own SEO company (www.sussexseo.net). Wish me luck :)