Hi Jill,

I spent this weekend trying to find out why my website is no longer showing up on Google or Yahoo. Through an article from WebPro News I was lucky enough to find your email signup. I sure hope you can give me some info to help me get my site back to where it was, and tell me why we are no longer even listed?

Looking forward to reading your newsletter.

Kind regards,

Linda K.

Jill's Response

Most weeks I would have assumed that Linda's site was probably just temporarily down when the search engines came a-crawlin'. But this was not a normal week.

I knew from recent forum posts and email that a new round of search engine spam had recently been caught and banned. Tons of unsuspecting site owners who had put their faith and trust in one particular SEO company had woken up one morning to find that their sites had completely vanished from Google, and in some cases, Yahoo. On SEO forums throughout the Internet, you could almost hear their anguished cries of "What have I done?"

What they had done was believe the sales pitches of slick-talking SEO telemarketers.

Instead of listening to their gut (which was telling them that if something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is), they put their sites -- and in many cases their livelihood -- on the line for the chance of quick-fix high rankings.

It seems that most of those who were banned have the same story to tell. The code and pages that they were asked to upload to their server (or that were uploaded for them) seemed kind of fishy, but the SEO company said it was necessary. They said that this was what you *had* to do to get high rankings, and that "everyone" did it. Apparently, they even have results from clients with which to back up their sales talk.

What these site owners didn't know was that results obtained through these methods are short-lived and dangerous to the long-term success of a site. Basically, it only lasts until the next round of bannings takes place. When one technique gets banned, they simply find a new way to spam the engines on your behalf. This gives the company a constant supply of short-lived high rankings to show potential clients in order to convince them to sign up to become their next guinea pig.

So when I received Linda's email and looked at the HTML code of her site, I wasn't surprised to see the telltale footprints of the notorious spam company, "Traffic Power."

I wrote the following to Linda:

"Looks like Traffic Power strikes again?

"You have all sorts of search engine spam that was finally banned by the search engines. You'll have to remove it all and then request reinclusion. At the bottom of your home page are hidden links to all the spammy doorway pages that redirect to your site.

"You may want to think about some sort of lawsuit against the company who spammed the engines on your behalf, or at least try to get your money back."

Linda was stunned that I knew right away which company was responsible for her banning. The ironic thing is that in the past I've had people ask me about Traffic Power, and since to a certain extent they are a competitor of mine, I haven't felt it was my place to speak out against them.

But not any longer.

I'm tired of sitting on the sidelines while good people who have a lapse of judgment (or just can't resist a good sales pitch) get taken to the cleaners.

If Traffic Power ever contacts you -- hang up immediately! They are like those evil Sirens in the Odyssey. If you listen to them, you'll be sucked in by their spell. Don't give them that chance.

If you have a site that has been "optimized" by them (and I use the term loosely), then check to see if your site is banned already. There's a chance you escaped this round of bannings, but that doesn't mean you're safe. You need to remove every trace of spam from your site as soon as possible. That means you need to take all the doorway pages down, remove the invisible links to them and any mouseover JavaScript spam that they may have put into your code. Even if you're still getting high rankings from their spam, you NEED to get rid of it. Yes, you will take a hit in your rankings, but you were enjoying ill-gotten gains anyway.

Take this opportunity to fix your site up the right way. Make it the best it can be for the search engines as well as your users. Read my articles and the past issues of this newsletter, and participate in my forum. There is never a good reason to hide pages of your site. If pages have info that is good for the search engines, it should also be good for your users.

Here are some additional resources for those of you who were burned by this horrible, horrible company that gives SEOs everywhere a bad name:

A thread on my forum from one man who fell prey to Traffic Power and is now paying for it in Google: http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=7421.

A WebmasterWorld Forum thread where a representative from Google explains what to do in order to get your site reinstated: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/24523.htm.

An area of SEOconsultants.com dedicated to providing advice for site owners who were burned by Traffic Power: http://www.seoconsultants.com/traffic-power/clients/.

A law firm that is gathering facts in order to possibly start a class-action suit against Traffic Power: http://www.girardgibbs.com/.

The sad thing is that for many years there has been a ton of information written on the Web regarding the bad practices of this company. Had any of the site owners who've been banned done the slightest bit of homework, they would have known that paying this company to spam the search engines on their behalf was absolutely not a good idea! In fact, some of them did know this, but the lure of easy high rankings was too strong to just say no.

I hope that the information I'm providing here can at least keep a few people from falling victim to this scam. Please feel free to forward this to others or point people to it once it's up in the archives on my site. The URL will be: http://www.highrankings.com/issue103.htm#seo.

Good luck!

Jill