A website called Web Design Library has recently been severely penalized by Google for attempts to renew paid links. Taking to twitter, an account by the name @vitaliykoloswdl was reaching out to companies, most notable of which was T-Mobile, to renew paid link agreements, often asking dozens of companies for contact with their “link building guy”.
The punishment? Google’s SERP (search engine results page) is listing Web Design Library at number 48 for the search query “web design”, where it was previously ranking at number 8. Even searching Google for the specific company name Web Design Library doesn’t yield a ranking.
This sort of penalty is a direct result of Google’s Penguin filter, which is built around discouraging the sort of black hat SEO tactics that result in lower quality search engine results such as overuse of exact-match domains, low quality article marketing and blog spam, keyword stuffing, and of course link farming (the purchasing of low quality links).
Sometimes black hat SEO can gain traction, but eventually it causes more problems than it’s worth. Our take? Always employ a strong set of white hat SEO tactics and build honest search engine rankings that last.
By Emerson Ward