Lets break down the "doom and gloom" aspect a little here.
Here is what happened, now this is my opinion, and I am not going after anyone specific so take it with a grain of salt.
Google came out with an algo update in early February that much everyone should already know. In that update, it basically says, you don’t update your site with new and fresh content your site dropped in the SERPs. People needed something to blame this on and like Xrumer and Scrapebox before, now it is HPRN's. If you notice this is a cycle that repeats itself constantly: People want to kill one thing to start the "new fad". HPRN's work, plain and simple. The reason why people are killing the homepage backlinks is because most of the providers could not keep up with the PR updates and the de-indexing of networks and kept all the money or didn't want to save a portion of the money their customers paid to reinvest in the networks. If you take a look back at the last year how many HPRN's have popped up and how many died within the first 60-90 days. We have only had 2 networks de-indexed in the last year. Not bad for having 7 active networks (6 public and 1 private, over 3000 domains total).
Does there need to be changes in the way HPBLs are setup? It definitely looks like it and we have already started planning for it.
But to say that HPBLs are dead is a misnomer, but that’s ok, it works out for us because now all the people who tried to do it over that last 6 months of the HPRN boom, and failed, will be gone. And we will still be around still giving page 1 rankings. If you have been following the "SEO Guru" Terry Kyle you will see that he is also not doing it anymore and that’s the only reason why he and others are saying "its dead", but thats actually untrue because in his last video he stated that he will be coming out with a HPRN that’s "new and improved". It's called sales tactic guys, and he is the best at it because he has somewhat of a cult following. If you see all the people that failed doing HPRN's, its because most saw a way to get some quick cash and didn't plan for the long-term, they did not want to put any money back into it and giving customers what they paid for. How about those "permanent" HPRNs, you think those sites were replaced after they got de-indexed? Not many. I know of a few people on WF and TP that have and I applaud them.
Now does it work for everyone? Nope. Should you be doing other SEO as well? YES. Diversification is key in SEO. Anyone with half a brain will tell you that. We still have plenty of people (80%) who rank very well for all their keywords and were not affected by the algo update or de-indexing. If your site sucks learn to take responsibility and make changes don't look for a patsy to pin the failure on.
Hope this clarifies things.
