Found Agency Loses Google Rankings
Is search engine optimisation still about rankings?
Lee Odden’s post in toprankblog is titled “Are Search Engine Rankings Are Dead?”. (I’m guessing the original title was “Search Engine Rankings Are Dead” and then he decided maybe it wasn’t so clear cut so he changed it to a question).
Anyway, The Australian had an article this week about Found Agency, a leading SEM firm in Sydney “Google slaps ‘black hat’ penalty on top search ranking”. Apparently Found Agency have plummeted in the rankings for the term “search engine optimisation”, having held a high position for this phrase for a while. Google didn’t like the fact that a good proportion of their links are coming from a hit counter that websites are using to record the number of visitors. The hit counter in question has a link to the Found Agency website. These links have been devalued by Google and the Found Agency no longer ranks for “search engine optimisation” and other relevant phrases. Actually they don’t even rank for their name any more. A search for “Found Agency” has in the number one slot the latest newsletter article from Search Engine Room “Found Agency tumbles in Google Rankings”. On page one, half of the results are about the Found Agency “penalty” for “black hat techniques”.
I doubt if the drop in rankings will have a significant impact on their business. This gets back to the points made in Lee Odden’s post about rankings having much less significance now particularly with the advent of personalisation and the growing impact of social media.
The biggest problem for the Found Agency is how they will manage their online reputation. They’ve put a notice on the home page of their website denying the rumours that they’ve been banned or blacklisted. I haven’t seen much blogging activity on the news yet despite the claim in the Australian that it has “spread like wildfire through the search marketing industry”.
I’ll conclude with a link for anyone unfortunate enough to be in this position.
Posted in Online Reputation Management
