The SEO community is a positive space, generally speaking, but there are a few cases where SEO practioners have, to reference Star Wars, “joined the dark side” and have completely disregarded Google’s guidelines, deliberately exploiting loopholes from flaws in Google’s search engine algorithm to a very large scale for profit. Worse yet, there is even a case of one man receiving a jail sentence for extorting money from his clients through threats of negative SEO, a practice that can actually lower a website’s rankings rather than raise them.
The first real mainstream story of shady, TOS breaking practices involves the famous American department store chain, J.C. Penney hiring the SEO company SearchDEX to help them during the 2010 holiday season, the most lucrative time of year for their ecommerce website: JCPenney.com.
SearchDEX proceeded to buy and trade links to JCPenney.com on other separate websites, not related to the J.C. Penny brand to trick Google into thinking that JCPenney.com was receiving organic links from various webmasters naturally. Doing this made JCPenney.com go up in search results in Google during the holiday season. Not just on Google either. Microsoft’s Bing is affected too since they use the same methods to promote sites (and they copy Google!). Soon, and , JCPenney was on top of a lot of searches where it naturally didn’t belong.
Eventually, Google, and reportedly its algorithms, detected the strange activity (an unaturally large spike in backlinks) and immediately cut them down to unnaturally low status in the Google search results. Over the years dozens of large scale paid link networks would get shut down by Google one by one all over the world such as places like Spain, Italy, Poland, Russia, France & Germany with Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s US webspam team at the time, even tweeting about one of the events involving the take down of 7 link networks in Japan.
Out of all the stories involving the SEO underworld the one that, without question, ultimately takes the cake is the case of William Stanley, a little known SEO consultant of of Dallas, TX at the time.
In early January of 2016 Stanley, a search engine optimizer, was sentenced to over three years in Federal prison for extortion. What Stanley specifically did was a mix of negative SEO and negative reputation management. This included posting fraudulent comments, creating links on “bad neighborhood” sites (pornography, gambling), and creating negative reviews if the victim didn’t pay him a certain amount of money. (click here for the full story)
Although the SEO industry is relatively new since major search engines like Google have only been around for about 20 years and are constantly developing and changing, there has been no shortage of illicit SEO practices that have made headlines time and time again.
Perhaps a whole “SEO Mafia” is hiding somewhere in the shadows 😲
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