SearchEngineFan

… their customers. Kind of. Well, that’s what you’d expect. SEOs convincing their customers by rendering superior services. But it seems some of the companies have found a new leisure activity. Going to court, against blogs and online communities.

The SEOLINE Case

The first remarkable incident has been just a few weeks ago. A german SEO firm seems to have gotten penalized by Google for presumably black hat activities. Too many Russian backlinks, as the rumors go. Some of the company’s customers might had been affected as well. At least somebody dropped a blog comment claiming to be a customer of the SEO company, saying that she cancelled her business relationship for the reason of inappropriate SEO conducts. The SEO company disapproved of the bad coverage and sent its lawyers to get the blog post removed. This action provoked a tremendous echo among the german SEO community. In the end…

…the SEO company was calling the lawyers back and is still paying Adwords to be found in the serps when searching for the company’s name. The whole Seoline Case is still documented at the blog.

The FAIRRANK Case

Now, a similar story seems to be on its way: the Fairrank Case. I’ll sum it up as it is reported at Thomas Bindl’s blog. The story reads like this:

Somebody has been posting at the online marketing bulletin board omtalk.com to the dislike of the SEO and SEM firm Fairrank. You’d expect Fairrank to contact the board administrator to remove the posts. And the company did. The board administrator kindly removed the posts and claims to have informed Fairrank about further technical measures to prevent similar bad posts in the future.

End of story? No. Instead of a friendly word of thanks Fairrank sent lawyers. Thomas is supposed to sign a paper that his board won’t ever be a source of bad information about the company. But a bulletin board owner can’t possibly sign this. He can’t prevent malicious posts as he can’t prevent the board being abused by hackers or spammers. Signing the paper would have meant for Thomas to close his board. As he isn’t willing to shut his community down he is forced to get the story handled at court.

The thing I’m asking myself is, how come a company is fighting some rather cooperative webmaster? If Thomas’ description of the ongoings is correct, some specialist company is endagering its online reputation. And hasn’t been learning a lot from the Seoline case…

Tags: fairrank, german seo, seoline

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 12:22 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.