In a video on YouTube, Google’s John Mueller said that a website might be penalized years after they spammed Google:
“I totally understand. It looks weird when you look at it in the press and say “oh, well, this site got a manual action here and I got a result here”. But there are lots of sites that don’t end up in the press like that that have the same problems, and they have to fight it much longer to […] resolve the issues that maybe they’ve been building up for years and years and finally it kind of bites them that they’ve been doing things wrong for such a long time.”
Spamming Google is always risky. Better use so-called white-hat optimization methods that play by the rules. The tools in SEOprofiler help you to get high rankings on Google without using spam methods: