iAcquire Banned From Google After Link Buying Allegations

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Hmm, this was posted May 24, 2012 at 9:03pm ET on Search Engine Land by Barry Schwartz.

The search marketing agency, iAcquire, that was allegedly responsible for buying links for clients was just banned from Google’s search results.

iAcquire was cited as the agency behind Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation’s link buy request emails. For more on that see our story named What Can We Learn From The Latest Brand To Be Called Out For Paid Links?

A site command search for [site:www.iacquire.com] returns no results.

Continued: iAcquire Banned From Google After Link Buying Allegations

[HTMLBasicTutor]

More from Barry Schwartz on this. On his own site this morning:

Last night, I reported on Search Engine Land that iAcquire was banned from Google possibly over link buying allegations.

I do not have the whole story yet but this is what we know...

Google Bans The Agency Who Buys The Link

[Dan]

Sounds scapegoatish. One organisation cops it whilst every well known SEO/SEM on the planet that is doing this for their own clients in a "hush hush" way, gets off scot-free (and let's not even start to pretend that they don't just because they write nice white hat blog posts to divert suspicion away).

It's absurd. Paid link buying went underground in 2007. I haven't seen a change in the behaviour at all, it's just not spoken above ground in a transparent way anymore.

[nneennaadd]

Well in that case lobbying should be illegal too
I mean buying links is just like buying ads isnt it? Google just needs to know how to filter links from "link farms", or even make algorithm better


@Dan I bet their goal was to scare those other SEO guys

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Further discussion on this issue at Search News Central: The iAcquire Affair; did D&Bcc get hit as well?

[redfeilds18]

well i think this is the first time Google banned the whole agency who bought the link, instead of who they bought the link for...

[robjones]

Originally Posted by HTMLBasicTutor

Further discussion on this issue at Search News Central: The iAcquire Affair; did D&Bcc get hit as well?

From that article:

Buyer beware

At the end of the day, those hiring and SEO firm or doing it in-house need to be aware of the risks and what those working with them are doing in their name.

Sadly, this happens far too often for my liking. My firm does a fair it of consulting work with forensic audits, in most cases after the site has been hit with some form of penalty. In many instances we find a ton of crap link building that the client was unaware of and not just paid ones.

Usual suspects often include;

Links on shoddy networks
Comment links
Profile spam
Egregious social bookmarks
Forum spam
Link wheels (or whatever they're called these days)

If he's right... Then the same stuff that works forum mods to death... The garbage linkdrops, the idiot threads, speed posting for count, spam profile creation... Is not only a waste of our time, it's detrimental to the clients paying for this dubious service.

We see the same wannabe seo professionals doing this stuff and all they do is make their own clients links persona non grata while doing zip for their ranking. Not what the customer was looking for when they paid these low rent SOBs.

[Manish Pandey]

Every now and then Google does this kind of stuff to scare the search marketing industry.

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Followup article by Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land:

Last week, iAcquire found itself accused of purchasing links for clients. Google seemed convinced, banning iAcquire from its index. Now, iAcquire says that it will no longer purchase links for new clients and will phase out paid links for existing customers and campaigns.

iAcquire: We’re Abandoning Paid Links

[snakeair]

What a mess to cleanup. lol

[seoservicesplus]

iAcquire still have Google PR3 and good Alexa ranking.

[~kev~]

Buying and selling links does not violate google guidelines, as long as the link does not pass page rank.

Bought links should use the nofollow tag, and everything will be fine.

The problem is, people are buying links and not using the nofollow tag.

In the google webmaster guidelines,

http://support.google.com/webmasters...n&answer=66736

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> tag
Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Originally Posted by seoservicesplus

iAcquire still have Google PR3 and good Alexa ranking.

Alexa is spyware, get that stuff off your computer.

[mariyajames]

Yes iAcquire is banned from Google search results...

If Google consider on natural link building then at this time iAcquire did just opposite of that.

Not just iAcquire there are so many other sites those are banned or lost their rankings badly after Penguin update.

[Web Source]

Oh boy, what a pickle they are in..

It could be that they are starting to clean house or they just want an example made to try and scare people into becoming more and more whitehat.