Originally Posted by oldgaga

RESUME:

For all webmasters that are trying to understand what is happening:

theporndude.com has been penalized and is passed from 4M to 300K visits (semrush.com),

Why?
a)Too much artificial links
b)He uses the "Cloaking AFFILIATE links" functionality to hide the real nature of his links.

"If you?re hiding the true nature of your links so you can send bots to one destination and human users to another, Google considers you cloaking for a malicious reason and will penalize you for doing so. This is also a bad technique, and while it?s harder to catch, it?s still obvious to some bots and will hurt you in the long run.

"

Source: How to Properly Cloak Your Affiliate Links

And as Gary Illyes from Google says: "Then Gary said he will say one thing, that the sites impacted by this update should have been because what they are doing are specifically against Google's webmaster guidelines. " (https://www.seroundtable.com/google-...ate-23603.html)