

How Google Cost Me $4 Million - tommizzle
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100901/how-google-cost-me-$4-million.html

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mustpax
You had me until "I called the two companies we hired to improve our ranking."
Google did not cost you $4 million, the fact that you were spamming Google
did. As it very well should.

~~~
luigi
Developers can and should take care of SEO themselves. No so-called experts
needed. I did a talk about it this weekend at Lone Star Ruby Conf:

[http://www.slideshare.net/luigimontanez/searchfriendly-
web-d...](http://www.slideshare.net/luigimontanez/searchfriendly-web-
development-lone-star-ruby-conference-2010)

~~~
sosuke
SEO is great for developers but he was paying for SEM, those folks cold
contacted sites to link back to him, that takes a lot of time to do and SEO
alone won't get you to the top of the SERPs for common keywords.

~~~
luigi
Cold contacting sites to ask for linkbacks is not marketing, it's a lame and
rarely successful attempt to game PageRank.

~~~
byrneseyeview
1\. It's PR. PR via email, but still PR.

2\. Maybe it's lame.

3\. Rarely successful? Any data there? It has certainly worked for the people
I've done it for.

4\. PageRank is not the goal. Qualified, revenue-producing traffic is the
goal.

~~~
Andrew_Quentin
Of course PageRank increases qualified, revenue-producing traffic.

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jonknee
His site still looks like SEO spam so I'm not sure he learned his lesson.
There are tons of content-less pages to keyword stuff like this:

[http://www.gourmetgiftbaskets.com/Gift-Baskets-Cleveland-
Oh....](http://www.gourmetgiftbaskets.com/Gift-Baskets-Cleveland-Oh.asp)

I also find it odd that every page features 20 logos from media outlets. That
doesn't get them anything and I seriously doubt mentioning the Colbert Report
helps sell gift baskets.

Link trading is still advertised, which seems risky considering that's very
close to what got them in trouble in the first place.

<http://www.gourmetgiftbaskets.com/partners.htm>

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ck2
Title correction for the original article:

 _How we admitted to violating Google's trust and threw away $4 million in
business._

~~~
SoftwareMaven
or _How we gamed Google to lay the foundation for our success_

Would they have had the opportunity to lose $4M if they hadn't gamed Google?

~~~
ck2
I wonder if they could have had $1M in business without getting greedy (or any
SEO whatsoever).

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Matt_Cutts
I'm pretty sure I know the specific SEO that broke Google's guidelines and
paid for links that pass PageRank, which led to this site not ranking as
highly. But I'll leave it to the gift basket company to see if they want to
call out which SEO it was that got them into trouble.

~~~
Andrew_Quentin
Hi. Very nice to see you here Matt. Logically, what is the difference between
paying for links and spamming sites, or, spamming webmasters, or other active
link building practices?

Also, I wanted to ask, what is the difference between advertising on a website
by the way of them putting my link on their site, somewhat like the google
link ads I suppose, but on a more permanent basis, that is, at what point does
direct link advertising for exposure to the traffic of that certain website
become link buying?

Should google not try and rely on other variables which are more reliable
determinants of quality than links?

~~~
pier0
Or what is difference between paying for spamming ads and paying for google
ads?

Oh wait, I know this one: with the second one Google makes billions.

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baby
I have 60000 fans on my facebook page and it doesn't really help me. So when I
hear about ~3000 fans, I don't see how you can do something of it. Same remark
for tweeter

~~~
Murkin
Why is this down-voted ?

One of his big "lessons" is doing social-media. Can't imagine how much money
he spends on FanPage and Twitter.

Only can wonder if that expense pulls him any clients (especially compared to
Google's search).

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hellweaver666
I'm not defending the dodgy SEO company but I think a lot of people forget
that for a long time buying links was a perfectly "normal" practice and was
not penalised by Google (it was a grey area, but at the time - everyone was
doing it). Then Google ran an update and lots of sites got penalised for doing
it.

In this guys case, it may not even have been an update that did it, but the
results of their competition sending a report to Google's web spam team - I've
seen this happen to people I've built sites for in the past. It's a morally
questionable tactic, but I've seen sites benefit by focusing on bringing their
opponents down rather than boosting their own ranking.

~~~
Andrew_Quentin
Morally questionable? I suppose it is the old dilemma of whether you should
tell the teacher that someone is cheating in their exam. I never did, but you
certainly should and have the moral high ground because they are not playing
fair.

------
ShabbyDoo
I bet this guy now would be willing to pay Google $100K+/year for personalized
escalation services should such an issue arise again. What if Google had one
set of rules for every site it crawled, but offered a personalized appeals
process for those who paid up? I'm not sure if I like the idea or not. Let's
presume that any "penalty box" algorithms end up (A) wrongly punishing some
and (B) incorrectly ignoring others. What if Google's search results changed
as a result of this "court only for those who pay" policy such that only those
in Category A who didn't pay up were excluded? Would Google's evilness be
reduced compared to the current state of affairs? Of course, Google would be
less evil if it offered everyone their day in court for free.

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dantheman
Does a flower or giftbasket shop really need to tweetspam everday?

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sosuke
What were the two SEO companies he hired? Even though they cost him $4 million
in sales he wasn't making that $8.9 million a year without their help.

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ddemchuk
I have to admit, I hate seeing SEO posts submitted here. Not because I don't
like them, but because of the ignorance so many of you show towards any use or
mention of SEO.

SEO isn't bad, Google themself has an SEO guide they released for webmasters.
Building links is not a bad thing, Google created the entire link building
game by relying on them for determining ranking.

Some of you need to step down from your damn pedestal and realize that
marketing makes money. No one is going to link to your site if they don't know
it exists. Link building and SEO is not illegal, and is a very valid way to
make money.

I would imagine the vast majority of you have nowhere near enough experience
to even comment on the use of SEO as opposed to when it comes to something
like another Haskell VS. OCaml post.

EDIT: for misuse of a word

~~~
Andrew_Quentin
Be civil. No need to tell us what we know or do not know, we know that much
better than you. Rather tell us what you know which is of relevance to the
topic in discussion.

~~~
ddemchuk
Quite frankly, a group of people whining about someone gaming the system of a
massive highly profitable company and not really understanding the underlying
dynamics of said practices is something I feel needs to called out and
denounced. I don't criticize the australian government because I'm ignorant of
their setup.

The majority of people here think the only morally acceptable form of seo is
using h1 tags and making sure to have alt tags on their images. There's a
whole different side of seo that must be used in order to even tread water in
most markets.

