I've excerpted a portion of the story below:
Over the past months, however, organic traffic from Google.com dropped from an average of 1'000 or so visitors / day to exactly zero. In sympathy, sales dropped along side, resulting in perhaps one or two sales per day or less, mostly from people who stumbled over the site by chance or by recommendation. For some reasons our pages were either removed completely from Google's index or have been tagged "supplemental result" (for a possible explanation, see below at "Other consequences"). Obviously, we could still pay for ads but that would never make up for the loss in traffic and, hence, revenue. Also, while we realize that Google owes us nothing, we are not inclined to reward Google for dropping our site. The little traffic coming from localized versions of Google or from Yahoo and MSN doesn't convert to revenue at all. We didn't find a way to remedy this situation because, although being a multi billion dollar company, Google doesn't seem to have a phone number.The moment I read this I couldn't help but shake my head in disappointment. This is a company that, apparently, made some sort of error that affected their Google rankings (they fell into supplemental, but are still ranked at Y! and MSN). As a result, instead of hiring a knowledgeable SEO firm to review their site and get them back into the SERPs, they concluded that, since organic search referrals from Google were their primary source of conversions, their only recourse was to make their software free and shut down their business.
Anyway, the resulting revenue from the current sales is far too low to maintain this site, to continue development of the software and to provide customers with good, useful, timely, and free support. We have therefore decided to call it quits and release all our barcode software into the Public Domain.
So why didn't they contract for SEO services? Were they not aware SEO actually exists and can help with problems such as this? Were they under the impression that SEO only involves submitting to directories for $29.95? It seems to me that we've got a long way to go in terms of marketing our industry and the kinds of services we can provide if companies (even fairly small ones) are so clueless to SEO/M that they shut down their business if they suddenly fall into supplemental at Google. Granted, this a pretty extreme case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but I'm fairly certain it happens far more than we realize: a company will drastically change its business model or give up on e-commerce if/when organic search traffic drops suddenly.
I'd be interested to hear what people think about this story and what needs to change in the search industry to raise awareness of our field. Also, if anyone feels like digging deeper and attempting to figure out what happened on Wolf Software's site to kill their rankings , I'm sure we'd all love to hear about it.
Sounds fishy to me. I don't buy that they don't know SEO...
10 years online with a 5 digit AdWords spend and they don't have a search strategy? A little digging reveals that https://barcodeformac.com 302's to https://pro-barcode.com. Both are barcode websites from Wolf Software.
https://web.archive.org/web/*sa_/https://barcodeformac.com/
There's a user called "branda78" that signature spammed the barcodeformac.com URL in a lot of seo-related forums with the keywords "barcode software windows". So someone related to the site knew something about SEO...
The person who write the post even knew enough to mention the supplemental index.
With the entire lack of existence of the site in Google it made me wonder if someone at the site knows a lot more about seo than they want to admit and tried something that maybe they shouldn't have.
Nice detective work by the way
It does seem a little to "innocent" sounding when they clue to the fact that they do indeed have some SEO knowledge. My big "out of the blue" idea is that perhaps someone thought they knew everything about SEO and did some shady or bleak nasty balck hat that ended getting them banned from Google.
But wouldn't that also affect their rankings with Yahoo! and MSN? I know that they are a little behind Google and are not as strict, but I would think that if something like that did happen and they had such negative reactions to it, it would also show in the other search engines.
I'm with shor in that there seems to be more here than meets the eye.
But, the foundation topic is still valid, after all, I think we can all agree that the vast majority in the business world has somewhat limited knowledge in the area of SEO and search marketing in general.
I still think it is important to bridge the gap through education and connecting with these people by comparing and contrasting traditional advertising with SEO and/or PPC. A website is much more than just a form of advertising, but this is a pretty good baby step to educate with and also gather their attention.
But I also think there is a bigger issue at hand that comes in even before getting to this point. Perhaps it is the result of the "you can do it all by yourself" view of the web. I think it is great for people to learn to create their own websites, but at some point, if your business is at stake, there comes a point where you can't possibly learn and do everything.
So I think we will see and continue to see these type stories until people respect that the web today isn't the same web of a few years ago, and if they are serious about business, then they need to add a web designer and an SEO/M to their "team," just like an accountant, lawyer, etc., even if only as a consultant.
Same here. While I too agree with shor, Scott's point is still valid.
I do think there's an 'if you build it they will come' mentality to the web for many and if they don't come the thinking is the business isn't one that can do well online.
I think there's also a lot of misinformation propagating online about seo and for those discovering it and trying to apply it they can easily come to the conclusion that seo doesn't work. We still people pushing tools to optimize your meta keywords tag after all.
Sadly I think there's sometimes too much infighting within the community and not enough of us all getting together to promote the community to those outside of it.
I agree with you about the 'you can do it all by yourself' view as well. For some reason there's a disconnect with people in understanding what it takes to run a successful brick and mortar and a successful web business. Most people wouldn't think to do the construction on their store, but most think they should build their own website.
It's partly how the web makes it so easy to do certan things, which in reality is both a blessing and a curse. It makes some things deceptively easy in the sense that it's easy to create something like a website, but not necessarily easy to create one that can meet the goals of the business.
I have to say it... can't... sit... on... hands... any... longer...
NYARGH
***FLAWED BUSINESS MODEL***
Good grief! Almost all their traffic off of a single point? No referral business after 10 years? No traffic after someone did something dodgy or they got hacked and so throw in the towel?
Don't try and *SELL* your business but dump it in to the public domain?
Something else is going on here. It just doesn't smell right. That's too heavy a drop too quickly and too fast to throw in the towel.
What is the unknown story - as others have pointed out here - something has happened.
Putting all your eggs in one basket, especially when that basket is a search engine, about the only thing that might be more fickle than a teenager and prone to dramatic changes every few months, is just not a good move...
but this feels more like putting all the eggs in one basket...... and then dragging it behind the car.
I completely agree with you as well as the many SEO super-sleuths above who've indicated that there's something not-so-innocent about the story.
I thought it seemed a little fishy when I first read it (on reddit) and immediately checked the date to see if it was April Fool's bollocks.
Nonetheless, I still posted about it because, although this particular story is a bit extreme (and likely inaccurate), I think it still raises the issue of corporate awareness of SEO/M...especially since this article, which was very popular in the tubes yesterday, is almost anti-marketing: the uninformed may read it and think, "shit, if I tank in Google, there's nothing I can do about it!" It seems totally ridiculous to us, but I'm sure it happens.
I think it is also important that people realise that any business - online or offline - has to be treated as such - a business. It is no good thinking it's easy because it is online.
I think it was a good post if only to get people talking - which it did - YAY!
"It seems to me that we've got a long way to go in terms of marketing our industry"
An irony that won't be lost on any of us here is that marketing (and PR) have appalling reputations - as soon as you see a marketing guy in any kind of TV show or film, you know that they're going to be evil!
SEO as a specific branch of marketing is even worse off. Not only are we evil, but we're also geeks! A lifetime's supply of free work for the first person who can think of a way to effectively market Evil Geeks...
It is a good thing I already had my coffee this morning or I would have shot it out my nose with that one!
I agree with the last few posts. I think they had way more problems than the lack of Google rankings. Obviously there is much more to the story than the information provided by them.
However, I am very interested in any ideas of educated the common budding website owner on the idea of SEO/SEM.
During the big boom, the world was led to believe that the Internet and a website to compliment a business was something of a silver bullet. T.V. advertising and other media coverage showing only success stories didn't help this idea at all.
I'm reminded of a UPS commercial a few years ago, showing a very small group of individuals huddled around a single computer. There was some sort of barbaric stat counter on the screen, and at the very moment their site "launched" the stats went through the roof. This left the very small group no longer concerned about amount of business they may not have, but how they were to accomodate the hundreds of thousands of instant customers. 'UPS to the rescue' was the idea I believe.
Obviously this isn't how things work in the real world, but commoners don't know this.
Also, large website companies have begun to offer "SEO" services to customers. Becuase they are larger companies, they haven't the luxory of researching methods and keeping with the times, but instead have to streamline processes for productivity over quality.
So, when someone finally understands the need for SEO, not fully undertanding what it is, they get a less than satisfactory result from a company and/or scam, further spreading the bad mis conceptions I get to clean up almost every day.
So I ask again, how does one (prefereably we, as a collective) educate the common business owner stepping into the world of online marketing?
Rand, get on that will ya?
Is it economically viable to do so?
Truly?
There will always be scammers - they prey on big and small companies.
SEOmoz has a good list of companies - personal recomendations help - I have a friend looking for them for web development and I'm off asking friends here about their experiences.
I have run across this scenario quite a bit over the years and especially as of late. It's funny, no matter how many leaps and bounds SEO/SEM and the industries surrounding make, public awareness seems to stay relatively the same. Don't people read the New York Times articles and the industry publications that go mainstream? DO the titles in those articles or the content within turn peope off because they dont understand the jargon or concepts?
Who knows.
Many times what the site owners don't understand is that it may only be one little thing holding them back and once it's fixed that order may be restored. On a couple of occasions I ran into clients that unknowingly blocked crawlers, or had poor internal linking structure etc. and once those minor things were cleared up, rank and conversions improved steadily.
I am not sure what MORE we can do than what we are currently.
Let's just spread the saying around ... "If it's broke, hire an SEO." and "If it ain't broke, hire an SEO."
I think ecopt is right, but at the same time this sort of thing doesn't suprise me.
Only yesterday I was reading one of the main online business magazines here in the UK, and there were two pieces of comment from supposed SEO experts (one in the form of a column, the other a letter).
Both were made up of such broad, meaningless statements, that anyone without much knowledge of, or interest in, SEO would have been none the wiser about some of the more basic aspects of this industry after reading them.
If even the 'experts' talk rubbish, in 'industry' magazines, we really do still have a hill to climb...
I'm totally confused as to why their pages are not in Google's index. They have several hundred links pointing to them, no meta robots restrictions, no robots.txt file... My guess is that either those pages are very new or that they restrict Googlebot in another way - by IP address or user agent.
Yahoo! clearly has them indexed and even ranking well.
Exactly! And that's what's so troubling: there's probably a rather easy fix that an experienced SEO would be able to address and keep their (ostensibly) lucrative business alive rather than them feeling forced to fold.
But how are they meant to do that when they would have properly never heard of "SEO", thats were the problem of little promotion and little knowledge of people outside the industry comes in.
I'm not disagreeing with you, kyles. In fact, that's the entire point of the post. We, as an industry, need to market ourselves better to raise top-of-mind awareness of what SEO/M can accomplish and why companies of all sizes need it if they're going to have an online presence.
"We, as an industry, need to market ourselves better to raise top-of-mind awareness of what SEO/M can accomplish and why companies of all sizes need it if they're going to have an online presence."
Yep, spot on. As the post says it is so very hard to do this as it is really such a unique industry and as you said, people do not know how much they can make with a good online presence.
Sorry If I wrote the post before in an "arguementive" way, it was not what I was trying to do.
Kyles,
I think that it is your duty as an online merchant to understand what SEO is, or at least know that you can perform better or worse. If you own a bar, you are probably very familiar with radio advertising, if you own a car dealership you are usualay versed in Television Ads. Same with e-commerce and search engines.
To say that 90%(ish) of my traffic and sales come from this source and I do not recognize that there are ways to perform better make me a lousy online retailer. This may be harsh, but if the case was that they did not know about SEO, that means they are poor online merchants, and probably deserved the fate that they have.
It's very strange. They even have a few links from WikiPedia showing in Yahoo, but in Google it's as though the site doesn't exist at all. Something tells me if they knew enough to restrict Googlebot they would also know enough to remove the restriction. Unless there are some ways to accidentally block Googlebot. I thought you needed to actively block Googlebot, but I admit it's not something I know for certain.
Will some one please tell me why no one has addressed duplicate content as the culprit? Set me straight...
"I completely agree with you as well as the many SEO super-sleuths above who've indicated that there's something not-so-innocent about the story."
I'm always torn about when to comment about particular stories that I see about issues with specific sites. Often there's more to the story than is being told by one side.
I'll give you an example from a completely different context. I'm looking at a story in a Swiss newspaper where a blogger is complaining that Google is evil because the person's site is no longer in Google. The truth is that someone from that blogger's domain submitted to remove large chunks of their own domain themselves with Google's url removal tool. So a webmaster hurt their own site, but is blaming Google.
On one hand, it could be a good case study of things to check or mistakes to avoid when you're a site owner. It could even provide a way to talk about how we might refine the url removal tool in the future (e.g. so that it would be easier to diagnose and fix such issues without contacting Google). But if I talk about one site, there's also the risk of looking petty or as if I'm criticizing that one site. I don't know what the right answer is. Maybe trying to pick and choose the issues where's a specific lesson that can be generalized, and talking about those?
Anyway, thanks for writing about an interesting topic, great scott.
I like these "SEOmoz commentors: PI" blog posts. It's fun to see everyone do some detective work.
If the thumbs are any indication, I think Shor wins the Old Man Withers Prize for excellent detective work.
Ok, who is this old man withers and how do I get my prize off him? ;)
Quote:"Old Man Withers was the owner of the haunted amusement park in the moive "Wayne's World." If you watch the movie carefully he appears at the beginning as well as the end. He is eating donunts at the bar and Wayne asks, "How is the amusement park going Mr. Withers?" We don't see him again until the end of the movie during the Scooby Doo ending sequence."A humorous name given to old people you dont know: -"Look at that Old Man Withers over there at the counter, he can stand." | "Oh my god, its Old Man Withers from the Haunted amusement park!"
Exactly, it's a pop-culture allusion to Scooby Doo.
I know - I feel postively lazy for just chucking up an opinion with no Sherlock Holmes activity to back it up.
Elementary my dear SEO
Seems very strange indeed. It is hard to believe that a company that has been selling online for 10 years did not know about SEO. Or that after 10 years in business it did not have any other marketing plan except what gets naturally referred from Google, without much effort.
i don't think that someone knowing about google's supplemental index and what it is and what it does, and a same someone having a adwords account, does not know about seo. i think that they made a mistake, or it's just pr (as in public relations) or linkbait! linekerati knows why!
I'm gonna say what you're all thinking - YAHOO CONSPIRACY.
:)
that's really scary that there was possibly a black hat operation that caused this business to fail. It just goes to show just how power the industry is.
Thank you for the post. It's very sobering to realize the power SEO/SEM truly holds.
-Clif
Thanks for raising these important issues Scott. As Chris commented, i think this type of thing happens a lot more often than is apparent. It's up to us to raise awareness of how important good SEO is I suppose.
Just an update on this. The site has now appeared back at #1 for its brand name. And, not suprisingly, the Webmaster Tools now say the site has 800+ backlinks.
If nothing else, this seems to indicate that Google may rank on what Webmaster Links Tool counts as links, rather than the search engine itself.
The links you see when doing the link: command in the engine are not a full picture of the number of links you have. Neither is the amount that you see in the Webmaster Tools, it's just a better picture.
So what you could probably say is that Google ranks on links that are most closely shown by Webmaster Tools - not actually on the ones that you can see in that tool....
Just going back to Rand's post where he comments that he can see no good reason for the problem, im in exactly the same boat with a website.
Recently and for no good reason (no changes etc) a site dropped from the SERPS for its own company name, that it has ranked #1 for many years. Its quite an uncommon term, so not hugely competitive (brand name).
Having looked closer at this, it seems that for some bizarre reason, the Google Webmaster Tools, Links Tool is incorrectly reporting inbound links. It shows 2 inbound links, to inner pages on the site. No links whatsoever to the homepage. Now, Google search itself reports 38 themed, inbound links to the site, which I know are still active and are "good", well earned links.
Why this sudden drop? Nothing at all has changed. Clearly the links tool is reporting incorrectly, yet seems to take this information into account when ranking. The site has been around approx 8yrs, indexed well most of that time and is something of a household name online for gaming. I cannot understand why it should suddenly just drop out.
This isnt the only case I have seen of this recently. On the forums, there have been a few people with similar problems. I expect we will see more of it, if this continues.
If you want to take a look at the site, its www dot whitedog do co dot uk
Im at a loss to what I can do, as Ive done everything I can ethically and cannot see how I have broken any webmaster guidelines. To drop in ranking for generic terms, I can accept. But to drop completely off the scale for a search on the company name seems bizarre.... especially as pages are ranking above it, that simply mention it on a single page.
Any ideas fellas?
You might want to pop on to WMW forum or a related SEO forum and check in there for help.
Wow. Talk about being dramatic. After reading that, it seems like they went the drastic route opposed to stepping back, realizing the problem and getting the right people (SEO's) to fix and save them. This is still a totally bizarre occurance to me, yet it happens more than you'd think.
Someone asked a question (on linkedin.com) asking about whether SEO was an elaborate scam to ripp business owners off. I was surprised that someone would actually even mention something like that. That person then confirmed that he heard the above information from his associates.
I don't believe that the SEO industry is not being marketed enough, its just that we are being portrayed as "scammers" and "low lives" because several businesses have had bad experiences with people who pretend to be SEOs. Worse of all, the companies who actually benefit from SEO-ing their website never talk about it, as though its top secret.
I believe that until we can get rid of the people who gives us a bad name, we will be continuously trying to defend the industry we work in.
This case is fishy but the post raises a real issue. Providing Google user support I see similar dramas day by day. SEO is widely unknown to small businesses, or considered dangerous coz too many scams sail under the SEO flag. Getting reliable SEO services is next to impossible for small businesses.
I'm sorry Sebastian, but that seems like a bit of a cop-out to me. Take out SEO and insert: payroll, IT, property management, whatever and its still just a lame-duck excuse for, I need this service, but I don't really know how it works and I don't want to take the time to research it, find out more, get some references and choose a provider who won't screw me over.
I'm not defending lame excuses. Finding an accountant, tax advisor or lawyer is quite simple because results are easy to judge and references within the community are trustable. Even local IT vendors are somewhat comparable by laymen. Judging SEO services is a completely other story, especially because Google still lacks the ability to spot monkey business outside the US. Optimizing techniques which no longer work in the US get foreign sites on the first SERP. So a good recommendation turns out to be a bad one when Google gets better on spotting foreign spam. Things like that make it next to impossible --for small businesses which simply don't have the resources to research SEO-- to find a provider who won't screw them over. Probably the local SEOs are just ignorant because Matt's team never bothered them yet.
It seems clear to me that the barcodeformac.com sneaky 302 redirect is the reason pro-barcode.com was banned. Barcodeformac.com shows up in the SERPs as a PR 5. These people knew what they were doing all along. A greedy SEO is a banned SEO.
Now now, to rectify the current situation... couldn't they take down the 302 redirect from barcodeformac and plead with Google or Matt Cutts to let them back in?
Here's the search for "barcodeformac" - https://www.google.com/search?q=barcodeformac&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
You can see that the top result is the exact duplicate of pro-barcode.com. Also take note that it is a PR5, but if you click on it, it redirects you to pro-barcode.
Check out the supplemental results. There's over 11,000 results and the majority of them are from 3d2f.com. Such as https://3d2f.com/pcgi/search.cgi?h=100&s=53010&os=winnt
This is exactly why they have been dropped.
Now, I'm thinking that they were behind this and it's their own fault. HOWEVER... WHAT IF... a big what if.... what if barcodeformac.com is owned by a competitor, and pro-barcode had nothing to do with all this. I've always heard that it's impossible to get your competitors banned by such tactics, but what if this happened to be the case??? It would open a giant can of worms.
Oooohhhh... Mr. can-of-worms opener that *IS* a good one!
I have seen a black hat SEO offer to sabbotage a competitor like this but...
barcodeformac - Registrant Contact: Wolf Software A. Wolf ([email protected]) +44.01623574950 Fax: BCM Box 2030 London, WC1N 3XX GB
pro-barcode - domains and registrars. Owner Contact: Axel Wolf Clemens-August-Str. 25 Paderborn, Germany, D-33102, Germany RACE Name: pro-barcode.com
So they are one in the same....
3d2f is - Registrant Name: MIKHAIL B MONASHEV Registrant Organization: MIKHAIL B MONASHEV Registrant Street1: 33, 7, M.Naberejnay str. Registrant City: Moscow Registrant State: Moscow Registrant Postal Code: 123362
Thanks for the info. Since they appear to be one in the same, then the case is solved. They spammed and got caught.
Thanks for the research guys! That clears it up pretty nicely. What else could they do after attempting black hat stuff and getting banned for it? Blame the billion dollar corp and move on I suppose.
and didn't have any other ideas - not so much a lack of SEO but lack of desire to continue any longer perhaps after getting caught...?
Depends whether they can be bothered. You have to wonder how mucky things got and whether they have simply lost interest in the business. Just as you can't leave your AdWords running and expect perpetual success, you can't just leave your website running and expect success.
Maybe more of the story is that this is just an excuse...?
Ultimately, I believe that they choose to go down this path and not investigate in SEO/M services because as you said, they properly never heard of it.
I still find that these days when ever I mention SEO to someone the normal person doesn't know what it is and have never heard of it.
Which I can understand, because there isn't much promotion on SEO, except all the blogs; but do you really think a person who has never heard of SEO is going to read or subsribe to a blog, they wouldn't know what it is about and would just get confused; I think.
Things just seem a little strange about this to me. I tried to find the old version of pro-barcode through archive.org and it was not there. I then looked and located another site barcodeformac.com that they had, that was registered since 2002, and then noticed as part of it's archived pages, that in Nov 2005 it turned into a parked page, right after the pro-barcode site was registered. The barcodeformac site did not change back from a parked page until march 2006. So it would be interesting to know what really happened.
If I make the assumption that they were trying to go to a more generic site name (i.e, not Mac specific) then it definitely highlights the need to be informed on the impact of site/business changes prior to making them. I would also find it hard to blame google for the problems arising from that sort of change as well.
Agree 100% with shor. I think we can summarize the signs that they knew SEO like this:
I can't believe that someone would do and know all that stuff without being very aware of SEO.
I also like to show my compassion to vissier. As in Australia, the search industry in Brazil is still quite ignorant about SEO. I'm optimistic though. Lately I have noticed some good efforts from agencies and the IAB in Brazil to change the scenario. Fingers crossed.
Unless a business is purely online, selling SEO can be tough. In my experience web revenues for traditional business account for 1-10% of total income, so from their point of view, even if the SEOs were able to increase traffic by 100% it may only have a 1-5% impact on the business.
With that in mind, and the fact that clients frequently have no idea what we're talking about (technically), its often easier for them to make other spending decisions they understand.
When a client is intent on making an online success, they are very intersted in SEO/M, Viral, and PPC.
One thing we have to keep in mind is web influence.
I can't remember where I saw it, or how accurate or biased it may have been, but not too long ago I saw a statistic about the influence of websites on offline purchases and it was a fairly high number.Obviously, strictly ecom sites are another ballgame, but most in the ecom game (okay... or so assumed until now) should have a rough understanding of SEO to begin with. The real challenge is educating those more traditional businesses.
I think the general idea seems pretty sound... the concept being that people are more likely to do their "browsing" online to learn more about what they are seeking, narrow their choices, etc., but many then choose to buy offline.
This makes sense for a couple reasons... people are generally impatient and even with next day shipping, given the option to go pick it up right now, will probably do so. And even though online purchasing is extremely secure, and some would argue more secure than offline, I think there may be a higher perceived sense of security when buying in person from the store, and it gives them that final, pre-purchase chance to touch and feel to again assure themselves of a "good" purchase.
However, this web influence will largely go unmeasured since these purchases won't reflect this influence but will simply be seen as offline purchases. Ideally, the store should offer a printable coupon or something for any customers coming into the store to get a better measure of the impact of their web presence.
I wish I could remember who but there are some figures out there for percentages who see an ad online only and respond to it by purchasing offline. I can't remember exactly but one of the columns was 36% and it might have been "saw online/bought offline"
This seems to be less of an SEO issue and more of a marketing issue. By no means should anyone believe that most organic traffic drivers are "luck." However, based on their comments, it doesn't appear that this business owner did anything to earn the rankings that they had. So why would they believe that the rankings are permanent?
Hindsight, it makes sense to protect your site with other marketing channels (PPC, Affiliate, etc.) to prevent losing your shirt.
I can't imagine having to rely on a single entity to dictate whether I get eyeballs, traffic, etc. If a large percentage of traffic comes from an unreliable source, then build up other sources to counteract potential damage.
On a more sympathetic note, their message is really sad. I can't even imagine someone trying to call Google to rectify this, but I'm sure it happens all the time.
I think the average mid-sized and larger business owner who is NOT aware of SEO is the rare beast who doesn't read any of the biz rags.
SEO's been getting coverage in the WSJ and USA Today, let alone local and regional business magazines.
The people most likely to be oblivious are the people who are marketing-phobic to start with. I know a lot of tech start-ups and smaller tech companies who behave really stupidly in regards to marketing: "Marketing is EVIL!" Yeah, actually selling your product and eating regularly is evil.
As the wise super-sleuths above uncovered, these guys know darn well how they got the punt. They weren't oblivious about SEO. I think they're trying to do a splashy 'wah me!' as a follow-on to the lawsuit against Google by the guys who claimed Google ruined their business when they dropped in rank -- a lawsuit Google won, of course.
The fact that businesses are aware of the term SEO and even know what it means doesn't mean they are taking full advantage of its benefits or even doing it at all.
Australia is in a far worse state! Most SME's are unaware/unconvinced of the benefit of generating business through that entity known as 'the Internet'.
We've got a while to go here in Aus. :(
It might be the hat *winks*
Just kidding *winks*
Does sound like you have some work to do down there. It is difficult up here but really when companies hear the media talking about it, they then start to believe they need to sit up and take notice.
argh!!
First, if you're getting 1000 visitor/per day, and u were ranking higher of most of the search engine it would'nt have been a miracle it would have been optimization. And the terminology they used are not used by people who dont know anything about SEO.
So why did they do this, it was a marketting strategy, if i would say but site completely got de-indexed and i was making millions from my site and blah blah..
its gonna get most people curious, as to why did this happen? If i am doing the same, i mite suffer the same fate?How were they making millions? I am sure after reading this story, an intriguing question would have come in everybodys mind.
This was a marketting ploy which i refer as "Ass as bait" strategy(no gay stuff intended), people are gonna come to you just to kick your ass and this way u gonna be introduce to the world. Its something like -ve publicity .
Coming to the topic, i think, being a SEO limits you to a small world (some mite call it large but relative to the real world its still small). So wat we guyz need to do is try to learn more about real world marketting n stuff, i think i mite get flamed for this, but this is wat i m gonna do, so that wen i sit in a meeting, i dont get branded as a geek living in world of 1's and zeros
Either this is flamebait or you're quite possibly the first 11 year old to post on SEOmoz