A fellow named, Philipp Lenssen, reported in his Google Blogoscoped weblog that long-time holder of the number 1 spot in Google for the coveted search term “search engine optimization”, SEO Inc. has received a penalty from Google and falling from the top rankings into oblivion. Actually, Mr. Lenssen reported that SEO Inc. had been banned but this may be too harsh of a term since SEO Inc. can still be found in Google, albeit finding them is like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.
According to Mr. Lenssen, SEO Inc.’s attorneys sent him a “cease and desist” order, so for monetary reasons, he had to take down the original post. John Battelle, has taken up, well, the battle and posted the original text in his Searchblog for all to see. Where Mr. Lenssen may have gotten in trouble with his report is not in the reporting itself but in the speculation of why the penalty occurred. His reasoning is logical, but may not be the full story.
My own theory, (and this is just a theory so no attorneys please) is that Google with their new algorithm has cracked down on back links that appear not to be “natural” links. When checking out SEO Inc.’s back links in Google, Google reports 33,600 back links that are PR 4 or above. When one takes a look at SEO Inc.’s site map, there is very little actual content that would encourage other Webmasters to want to link to this site (at least not 33,000 of them).
So, anyway, this is just a theory. Over the years, many websites have conducted link-building campaigns, traded reciprocal links, done third party linking and other linking strategies in order to achieve higher rankings so SEO Inc. is not alone in this. They just may be a casualty in a Google crackdown on “over-linking”. Anyway, this is just some more speculation to chew on. When a giant like SEO Inc. falls, many David’s like me come out and wonder what the stone was that made the giant fall.
