In another tale of be careful of what happens, who you do business with, and what your approaches are going to be in relationship to SEO, Traffic Power’s CEO has been arrested in a foreclosure scam by Nevada state authorities.
Google’s Matt Cutts has confirmed that people who did SEO work with Traffic Power have been removed from the Google index, meaning a lot of pain for people who need to petition Google to be put back in search engine results. Where you see one thing that is wrong, it is interesting to see more things being done wrong as well.
Truswell interviewed Carolyn Ellsworth with the Nevada Secretary of State’s office, who said at least sixty homeowners thought Marlon — at times using four different aliases and 45 corporations to allegedly buy homes — could help save them from foreclosure. But he didn’t really buy the house or pay off the mortgage, according to Ellsworth, who told KVBC that Marlon would get the rightful owners out of the house under false pretenses and would, instances, rent the houses to tenants. Source: Searchengine Watch
While the CEO of traffic power has been effectively removed, and personal comments from people from the company roll in, it will be a hard time for folks who now need to go back and try to get back what they have lost by using traffic power.
SEO techniques can be both good and bad, the web master guidelines from Google are important, as it is a clear cut way of dealing with SEO. While there is a lot of blog spam, and there are ways of gaming Google, these things are usually ill advised. You really do get what you pay for, and if you pay for someone to try to game Google, or indeed anyone in any business, like the CEO of traffic power, you end up paying a penalty.
It is always well advised to stay away from black hat SEO tactics, no matter how tempting, or how desired, eventually you get put in jail, either physically or metaphorically.
Update: 16:15 03 Jan 2006 - Julie from Julies Journal mentioned that we did the wrong link back to her blog, this entry has been corrected from the original link. Thanks Julie! Techwag.
I would like to add, that I haven’t worked for that man in over 3 years. I’m all about the white hat of SEO! I would like to thank him for teaching me what black hat SEO is though. I think it gave me a nice and well rounded education about SEO.