June 13, 2005

There are companies who still do this?

Eons ago (in the young wild days of the internet, the 90's) we used to do search engine optimization for the first full-time craphouse I worked at. We had all sorts of tricks, invisible text, link farms the whole bit, and for a while it worked quite well. But now?

Recently I received a letter in the mail (land spam) trying to market a search engine optimization company to us. Does this stuff actually work? I know there's the blog spammers and link farms but wouldn't you think that most major search engines have these guys pegged? Here's a BoingBoing article about an insidious SEO company.

From the article:
"Phillip Lenssen blogged some material about a "Search Engine Optimizer" (a company that helps web-developers inflate their rankings with search-engines) called Search Engine Optimization, Inc. The service had all but vanished from Google's database, and Phillip, a commentator on this industry, noted that this boded poorly for the company, indicating that they'd probably done something wrong to incur the wrath of Google (the "Google Death Penalty"), which meant that they ended up looking totally incompentent: not only couldn't they improve your site's PageRank, they couldn't get themselves ranked on Google.

The company responded with a threatening, bogus Cease-and-Desist letter telling Phillip that he had to take his page down or face legal action. Never mind that Phillip's post contained nothing actionable, he couldn't afford a lawsuit and poof, these bullies were able to censor their critics off the Internet."

Read the whole article.

Posted by bkirsten at June 13, 2005 11:03 PM | |