For GOOGLE to slap penalties to a website ,GOOGLE rules most be broken .
Not only must they be broken, but with the latest update "Fred" which weighs the quality of the a site's backlinks (and their backlinks, etc..) a site now "officially" suffers based on their inherited associations. This was always an assumption but now its actually a known feature. The interesting thing, is I've noticed that many local popular / ranking agency sites, have decent SEO but not perfect... its like watching a bunch of chefs compete with the same dull knives.... yet they are all competing on the same level which really makes it interesting to observe.
GOOGLE has made many updates to their algorithms over the years PEnguin & Panda and some 2.0 versions
Those were indeed major updates. In the past 4-6 months Google has rolled out some pretty aggressive algorithm updates which mainly target :
mobility (mobile first/AMP)
agressive advertising practices
site speed and security
backlinks profiles
content structure and quality
Normally, this is to improve the quality for Adwords clients (which can't apply to escorting) as it improved the ROI for advertisers, but it also has some great overall usability benefits to end users. Also, I've witnessed faster ranking improvements by addressing these factors (especially mobile and disavouying bad backlinks)... within 1-2 weeks... this is crazy. Especially when competing sites did not. This is a great advantage.
Some strategies like link wheel are way tougher to execute which has change ranking position for many
Link wheels are a thing of the past. Tho some established sites will benefit from their legacy link structures for a little while longer, many of those backlinks are implemented in a way to not only be considered as "bad" in the eyes of the current algorithms but actually make it easier for Google to demote them. The problem, is this could also hurt legitimate established sites which in general is why they don't simply flick the switch at large.
One of the hardest things right now, is to get reliable results. Your searches, your browsing patterns, IP, location, affect the rankings you see. So its normal to see sites moving in the rankings but it doesn't apply to users the same way. I don't even see the ranking changes as first discussed in this thread and can validate that from different locations as well....
its a goddamn tough game
This being said, I would give my left nut to have access to agencies Analytics...