Live Wedding Bands

For Six Years one of my websites which is Music for London has done very well on the natural listings. About a month ago I received a google page 5 or 50 spot penalty, basically all my listings had 50 places put on it.  The main two reasons I suspect is,

1) A  Wordpress theme I sponsored with my link attached to was a runaway success and it had garnered some 80,000 links for one of my pages

2) Because the site was doing so well, I had stopped using Add Words at the same time.

I am not exactly sure what triggered the penalty, it might have been one or both.

The penalty of course dropped business by 90%. Fortunately for me, I have been involved with some other websites plus brick and motar businesses and this has kept things going for me, unfortunately not for many of the musicians who  used to get regular gigs from my company and the two staff whom I had to let go. I feel sorry for the older musicians I use to get lots of work for because they still have no clue how to get on the web beyond paying someone to build a website. Which basically means they will get no work from the web in the near future.

I have lived and breathed SEO for Six or Seven Years now. So my question is do we continue to build businesses on the Google Gamble, i.e build something to be profitable based on lots of guess work SEO? How much is enough? when is it enough? do we have to use a different model? it seems pretty easy to Google Bowl someone as this has happened to one of my sites when I woke up one morning and found it had disappeared from the Searches and it had 200+ links from porn sites……

I do respect Google for keeping the searches clean of spam and I do realise they have to do what they have to do, mainly to increase their addwords revenue as well.

But Ultimately do we go for the Google Gamble?