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Here's a data point. I've got a 10-year-old blog that's ultra clean, no redirects, popups, automated traffic trades, or anything sleazier than old-fashioned manual link exchanges. Advertising is affiliate links, JuicyAds banners for years, and (starting fairly recently, maybe a year?) one little block of 4 plugs from PlugRush.
Had a surfer notice I was vanished from the index, asked me what was up. I checked, and sure enough, the search for "blog name" that used to return at #1 no longer returns at all in the first 10 pages.
Logged into Webmaster Tools, checked the Manual Actions page. Sure enough, I've got a sitewide "Cloaking and/or Sneaky Redirects" manual action listed. Ouch!
My PlugRush is supposed to have mobile redirects disabled (they've never made any sense to me, why would you piss off a daily repeat visitor you could advertise to yourself for years by sending him forcibly away the first time he gets on the internet on his shiny new smartphone?) so I logged in and checked. Mobile redirects box is unchecked for that adzone, as it should be.
So. I have Plugrush on my site, I never used mobile redirects, I got the sitewide cloaking/sneaky-redirects manual action, and I don't know why. (When I "Fetch as Google" using mobile useragents, everything looks fine.)
Is this enough to point the finger at Plugrush? No. But I gotta be suspicious. I suppose it could be JuicyAds, but I trust Jay quite a bit more than I do the unknown-to-me Plugrush guys. (And no, I never sold my mobile traffic to Juicy, either.)
So, no conclusions. But I'm throwing this data point out for the benefit of anybody else who is trying to figure out the pattern based on accounts in this thread and elsewhere.
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