Title of article is "How Google Cost Me $4 Million"

Give me a break.  Google sends this company millions of dollars of free traffic, and when it disappears the guy claims Google "cost" him $4 million.  During that time, other companies were presumably "getting" $4 million from Google.  Inc needs to write better headlines.

Well the headline serves a viral marketing purpose which is why I imagine they chose it.

Ok, so Google penalized someone in 2008. Seems to me there were a lot of penalties handed out around then ... good FUD for Google getting an old story as a headline in 2010 :)

Funny how Google hasn't done a thing about the numerous "brand" flower brokers who blatantly purchase links with the elegance of a 14 yr old spammer.

When I read this the day it came out I couldn't believe that an SEO firm would by paid links for their client without their permission. I don't know if this is a standard practice among seo firms, but I would imagine it would be in their best interest to ask the client if they care if some of their link portfolio contains paid links.

I believe that buying links is to SEO. What a base house was to the 80's.

The headline should read "How an SEO firm cost me $4M by getting me banned in Google"

If your average joe reader figures out that's the real story it doesn't bode well for SEOs.

I'm with IncrediBILL and a commenter on the original thread. The story is "How an Unscrupulous SEO Firm Cost Me $4M"

The SEO firm was (allegedly) buying links without the client knowing about it. How many levels of wrong would that be? It would have been interesting to learn what, if anything, happened to the SEO firm. If the client wants to roll the dice, that's one thing.

Friends, this one is beyond crazy. I mean people do not realize how much we depend on traffic coming from search engines. For me Google is approx 80% of me search engine traffic - so if I lost me place is would be all over, but the singing. Of the fat lady that is.

Ok I'll be the skeptic here - I wouldn't be surprised if the guy knew full well his consultants were buying links.

Personally I love he he didn't panic too much (so he said in the article) and instead he immediately started putting together a game plan on how else to bring in that lost traffic affiliate marketing, PPC and social media. I can't believe he wasn't doing any social media prior?

First, we really don't know if he was penalized, or for what reason.  As soon as I went to that site's home page I saw spam-soup.  There's like only 800 pages on the entire site, and he's got 117 (yes I counted) links just on the home page.  A quick look at the Wayback machine for his site in 08 shows a similar mess - and the content is overflowing with repetitive keyword nonsense.  So he could have been penalized for having a spammy site with little unique content just as easily.

And he may be showing up these days for some high value phrases, but I bet he's missing a boat-load of business.  Whoever's doing his SEO is still ripping him blind.  :-)

Man that's so cool that after stopping that nefarious agency some of those paid link publishers went ahead and kept up the links out of the goodness of their hearts! Sites like http://www.ired.com/ and http://www.afrogolf.com/page18.html and http://www.dtheatre.com/read.php?sid=2801 are too cool for doing that.