I hear/read lots about google penalties, lots of outdated stuff like keyword stuffing etc, but the most relevant these days is backlinks. But when I check all my competitors, and pretty much any given website, they all are clearly violating google guidelines on links. Spammy blog comments, social profiles links and all the rest. But they don’t seem to be penalised for it? I’ve checked many SEO agencies, ranked on page 1, and they all have countless spammy links.

So my question is a) how common is a google penalty and b) can you have a penalty without a manual action logged in Google search console? As in, you have a penalty but you are unaware.