PissedConsumer.com Link Network Exposed - Dropped From Google

I got a call from a client today saying that the negative pissedconsumer.com review that was showing up just a couple positions below him in the search engines when you typed in his company name, was nowhere to be found. After checking into it, pissedconsumer.com was nowhere to be found either. I did, however, find a really interesting SEOmoz post that exposed a link network that pissedconsumer.com was running:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/pissedconsumer-link-farm-dominating-google-serps

Chris1, an occasional SEOmoz blogger, did some great investigative journalism and exposed 177 domains that were part of the pissedconsumer link network. The article was published on SEOmoz and got the attention of Matt Cutts at Google. Consequently, all of the domains in the link network have completely disappeared from Google.

I, for one, couldn't be happier. Our client has a really unjust review on pissedconsumer.com that has cost him a lot of business. Pissed Consumer wouldn't do anything for my client unless they joined the "Reputation Management" program for $1995.00. Extortion at it's finest.

Thanks to Chris1, Karma at it's finest has been served up and fed to PissedConsumer.com and well over 150 other complaint based domains that were all owned by the same individual.

The only thing I'm curious about at this point is how long the Google ban will last, and if there will be a penalty given even after pissedconsumer.com gets included again. Google seems to be a little bit easy on sites that use black hat SEO methods, dropping them out of the index for a while, but bringing them back right where they were after they're granted reinclusion. Officially, Google devalues all the links in a link network like this, but from what I've seen it doesn't seem to make nearly as big of an impact as it should. Google may decide to make an example out of this site though. Who knows?

 

Awesome news. I did a similar blog write-up about this crooked site last month. Good to see justice for once. These guys were gaming google search results to the extreme.

 

coolest example of fine online journalism . Awesom work

 

Here is my investigation on these guys from back in September...

http://www.sockmoney.com/2008/09/how-to-game-google-serps.html

Good to see the online webmaster community come together to bring justice to crooks like these guys. Funny thing is, after I posted my findings last month, they actually came by my blog and posted a threatening e-mail to me.

Karma's a $%## huh guys... =)

 

Karma is as sweet as ice cream sometimes. The more stories I hear about this guy, the sweeter it is. I can't believe that he didn't take action and remove the links even after you exposed his link network. Nice article by the way. Looks like you broke the story even before Chris1.
Quantcast comes up #1 right now for PissedConsumer.com, and they estimate that the site was getting 572,000 visits per month, so to go from that to zilch overnight has got to be a devastating blow to his adsense account.
The funniest thing about all of this is that the benefit to the link network didn't really even help pissedconsumer.com all that much. 170 links out of 11,500, and only a few of them being decent.
It would be a shame if it happened to another site. I'm really not that spiteful of a person, but I can't help but smile on this one.

 

Count me as one of the companies celebrating this. I submitted a complaint against them too.

I found their spam by putting in linkdomainissedconsumer.com -siteissedconsumer.com along with our company name into yahoo.

I don't want to get into details, but my company is on the up and up and keeps very detailed records when customers call with complaints. We have very good reason to believe that most of the complaints against my company on pissedconsumer are completely fabricated.

 

Don't worry, if all the "black hat" applications are removed it will last about 5 (FIVE) years.

 

I hope they get at least 5 years! The problem is they used black hat tactics to actually start getting legit links since they surged to the top of SERPS so quickly. So if they were to return they would still seem semi- legit, even though they gamed Google to get there.

I was researching some of their early content/postings since I was curious how a site less than 2 years old came to accumulate so much content. It all seemed to be scraped from other complaint sites when I did exact text searches in Google! This was before they were booted. So there seems to be another bigger problem there.

Stealing content and gaming Google results, not a very good business model.

 

I have noticed that PissedConsumer.com has been added back to the Google Index one year later and they have a new strategy.

They have created 4,400 sub domains and are cross linking all of the sub domains to each other. You can see them on sitedossier.com

Their model is to make money on Google Adsense. So they are leveraging the trademarks and name of the 4,400 companies to earn several dollars for every 1,000 page views they get. Well, because of their spamming serp results with sub domains and cross linking them they are getting 500,000 page views+ per month. Take a look a compete.com.

The sad part is many companies have their reputation harmed because competitors post false information or confused people post untrue things. Most people can't fight back with good content because of their link farming strategy.

All of the affected companies should report them to Google for SERP spam.

 

Nice. Bad or fake reviews can truly damage a company.

 

What a sad business model