Dutch SEOs hit hard by Google ban

Not sure if you guys are interested in this, but it is making the headlines here in Holland: 2 dutch SEO firms (the 2 largest I guess) have had allmost all client sites banned by google.

Some brands: Yakult (some weird milky drink) and T-For-Telecom. Both at least pan-european. The *.nl domains are completely gone from google.

We all know that if you try to fool google, you get banned, no news there, but the real news is is that this has been news in the papers for the last 5 days. (Financial/business section, not IT ..)

I tried to follow the articles about what they did to get banned, and I think we can round it up by 2 things

1) the SEO firm created a 'free' guestbook script that small websites could put up on a site. but in the background, that script would check with the SEO firm from time to time to get a list of URLs to promote. These urls were put in the guestbook as hidden links. and that script was not hosted by the seo so they thaught they could get away with it.

2) javascript cloaking - enough said about that - but they claim (ceo was quoted) that 'this is the most common practice in the SEO-business'


and for all this they both have been kicked out the ducth internet advertisers association (wow! that will hurt <g>)

I personally liked the first action: create a free script, send out tons of copies and put a "sponsored by" section in it that YOU can control remotey. If they would have done that, and not hide the links, it would have been a great ibl thingie.

and the saga continues: today's article on this was that the SEO firm claims to be "in contact with google" to resolve this matter. I like your opinion on this. all I ever got from google were automated "Hello $firstname, ..." e-mails. How the f**k does one 'get in touch' with google 'to resolve' something?


[woops, sorry for this long post]

 

You can send them emails and get a response.

Also, if you use them for adwords and have a personal account manager, you can get a little help that way too.

 

Do you have any oline news link on this

 

Interesting post.

Well, they deserve to be banned but poor clients ... Should get a refund.

 

And relisted in Google.

 

I would believe the clients (the major ones at least) will be back in very shortly

 

Id have thought so...

After the 1p disaster, al lot of those sites got back in quickly.

 

If you are big, you should be safe.. people would think google was broken, not the Financial Times if noone could find them. Even though..

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=financial+times+hidden+links&btnG=Search

 

Hehehe - I never heard about that...

Tut tut