14 DAY TRIAL // One SEO provider is getting sued by one of the companies it was employed by for using spammy techniques that violated Google’s guidelines. The bad news for Rainmaker Institute, the SEO specialists company, is that the ones suing is Seikaly & Stewart, a law firm in Michigan.
The law firm is annoyed that the defendants built link farms on the behalf of the plaintiff’s legal domains, something that eventually damaged the company and its visibility online.
“Expert analysis performed since the conclusion of the contract has shown that essentially no links were created for protectyourstudent.com and seikalystewart.com. Approximately 6720 links appear to have been created for Oaklandbusinesslawyers.com, but all the links with the exception of approximately 188 links, were worthless links built with link farming techniques and, in many cases, were not forwarding to the Plaintiff’s webpages at all,” reads the complaint filed with the court.
The file also mentions that starting with April 2012, Google has used its new algorithm, called “Penguin,” which enforces new policies against link-building schemes. This made it even less likely that Rainmaker Institute would be of any value to its clients, including the law firm.
“Upon information and belief, it quickly became even more apparent to the Defendants that their schemes would have no positive effect and might have a detrimental effect on the webpages in domain names owned by the Victim Firms; however, Defendants continued to take money for their worthless services, without disclosing that it knew that the alleged services would be of no value,” the complaint reads.
The company did not mention whether or not the scheme has impacted its Google ranking, but considering Google’s attitude towards such practices, it was just a matter of time before the web giant cracked down on Rainmaker Institute’s network and impacted the law firm’s sites along with all the others that were handled by the SEO provider.
According to Eric Goldman, Internet law, advertising law and IP professor at the Santa Clara University School, a similar case ended up in the court of New Jersey. There, a SEO firm was accused of negligence by its client for causing a duplicate content penalty for the plaintiff.
This time around, however, there’s no mention of specific damages and there’s no mention about whether or not the domains of the law firm were penalized by Google. The practice, however, is still condemnable since it goes against Google’s guidelines.