According to a thread in the WebmasterWorld.com forum, a search engine optimization company called Top-pile.com has gone down after 6 years in business on the Internet. The CEO, Paddy Bolger, left a lengthy and honest message outlining the reasons for his SEM’s untimely departure, which included being dumped in the rankings by the search engines, particularly after Google’s famed or infamous Florida update in November 2003.
According to this thread, Top-pile.com built its fame and fortune upon some techniques that are considered today to be “black hat” techniques such as using hidden doorway pages to generate top search engine rankings for customer websites. Now, one can get moralistic and shake a finger and say, “Bad, bad, bad!” But the truth of the matter is that Top-pile.com started using these techniques before they were considered to be black hat techniques.
In 1999, for instance, some of the techniques that Top-pile.com used were considered to be clever and cutting edge within the SEM community. It is only within the past 3 years that these techniques have been increasingly frowned upon within the SEM community and more importantly, by the search engines themselves.
To me, Top Pile didn’t go down because of a failure in morality or ethics, but because of a failure in flexibility and forward-thinking. The moral climate on the Internet has changed over the past few years and rather than adapt (albeit painfully), Top Pile continued to travel down its same path. Its this lack of adaptation, I believe, was the downfall of this company.
This is a good lesson not only for other SEM and SEO companies but for all companies as well. Flexibility and adaptation within a changing business climate is a must for the sake of survival. Once you discover your company has been built upon a shaky foundation, you must do what you can to shore up that foundation and adapt. Continuing to travel down your same path without adaptation can only lead to train wreck results.
Hopefully, Paddy will be back after clearing up the train wreck and build a better train (or a better mousetrap). Train wrecks are painful but the world doesn’t end because of one. The best thing to do is to learn the underlying factors that caused the last train wreck and make modifications so that this doesn’t happen again. The best train is a keen train of thought – an old Chinese proverb, I believe.
