Google
Posts the Truth About Traffic Power
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
February 13 2006
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Something interesting is happening at the Googleplex. Just a week after
publicly slapping BMW for using cloaking and doorway techniques, Google
has confirmed a much larger penalty it applied in 2004 against what
was once one of the largest SEO firms in the world, Traffic Power. When
an
SEO firm gets its own site banned from Google it is somewhat interesting
but not terribly newsworthy. It becomes an enormous story when that
firm’s
client list is banned from the index.
About eighteen months ago, Google assigned a penalty against Las Vegas
based Traffic Power setting off a chain of events that continue to affect
the SEO community to this day. Sometime in the first weeks of June 2004,
Google brought the boom down on Traffic
Power, banning it and its client
list from the Google index.
Having already made a bad reputation for itself by hiring a legion of phone
solicitors to cold-call small businesses, Traffic Power had accumulated
a fairly large client list. Traffic Power was huge, boasting over 10,000
clients at its peak. As a result, they fell hard. On the way down, they
filed a civil lawsuit against popular blogger Aaron Wall and the owner of
a consumer-rant site called TrafficPowerSucks.com. They also sent Cease
and Desist letters to a number of other web-publishers, effectively creating
a climate of liable-chill to forcefully dissuade others from reporting on
the saga.
Along with dozens of other bloggers, a search marketer named Aaron Wall
covered the story on his blog, SEOBook.com. What made Aaron different from
everyone else is that Traffic Power chose to use him as an example, filing
a lawsuit against him in the early summer of 2005. They chose the wrong
target. Aaron is a popular and sometimes controversial figure in the SEO/SEM
industry. He has a lot of friends and even more friendly acquaintances.
Coverage of the suit propelled the story back to the front pages of the
industry and mainstream
press.
This weekend, the story took another twist when Matt Cutts, Google’s
chief search engineer, posted definite confirmation
of the penalty on his
blog. In doing so, Cutts lifted the liable-chill by providing proof that
everything Aaron posted to his blog was true in fact.
Cutts appears to have been moved to post confirmation of the ban in response
to a post made by Aaron at Threadwatch on January 27, 2006 in which he outlines
specific issues Traffic Power claims in its lawsuit.
The penalty was imposed over several techniques known to violate Google’s
posted webmaster
guidelines. From the use of java-script redirects across
literally thousands of doorway pages to the linking of those doorway pages
through an artificial link-density network, the SEO tactics (often automated)
used by Traffic Power on hundreds of their client sites were pure spam.
It seems highly improbable, by the summer of 2004 that no one at Traffic
Power realized its techniques were in violation of Google’s posted
guidelines.
Reports about the ban started almost immediately after it was imposed in
2004. There were a
lot of frustrated business
owners out there looking for
answers and assistance. There were also a number of SEO firms who wanted
to use the case as an example of the worst that can happen if your SEO uses
spam-driven techniques. Articles appeared on Blogs, in trade journals, in
local (Las Vegas) magazines and, after Traffic Power tried to sue a couple
small web-publishers, into the Wall
St. Journal. The Southern Nevada
Better Business Bureau and the Search
Engine Consultants Directory got into the
fray, both publishing pages warning consumers about Traffic Power. A mysterious
group known only as “the
consortium” materialized to investigate
Traffic Power, presumably with the intent of forming a class action lawsuit
against them.
There was one other thing that caught Google's attention back in the summer
of 2004 when Traffic Power got banned, which wasn’t mentioned in Cutts’ blog
posting. They used an absurdly large network of doorway pages as an indescribably
complex link-farm. This violation of Google’s guidelines was based
on a network of doorway pages creating an artificial link density for pages
or documents within it that worked wonders against the link-dependant algo
Google was running at the time. Though the Google engineers already knew
about the exploit, the massive degree to which Traffic Power abused it was
one of the major catalysts in the Jagger/Big Daddy updates playing through
today.
Many in the industry hope Traffic Power, now operating as First
Place will
quietly drop the suit against Aaron.
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