iAcquire Banned From Google After Link Buying Allegations
Posted on 25. May, 2012 by admin in Search Engine Land
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. Here is a screen shot:
iAcquire’s robots.txt file and source code has no signs of them manually requesting to be deindexed from Google. So this seems to either be a weird bug or an intentional penalty delivered to the agency by Google.
It also appears that the parties discovered in this investigation are all delisted from Google.
We reached out to Google for a comment but at the time of publishing this story, we have not heard back. If and when Google does reply, we will update the story.
Mike King, the Director of Inbound Marketing at iAcquire, responded to a tweet I sent him asking if Google delisted iAcquire. He said, iAcquire “sure was” delisted by Google. He then went on to explain that there was “no network” for Google to ban so they had a “hissy fit” and decided to ban the agency.
Here is his tweet:
@rustybrick sure was. There’s no network for them to kill so that’s them throwing their hissy fit.
— MyCool King (@iPullRank) May 25, 2012
I am not aware of another agency that was banned by Google for this practice. There were link networks and link brokers that have been banned but I don’t believe there was ever an agency that was banned for this practice.
We will update the story when we learn more.
Related Topics: Google: SEO | Link Building: Paid Links | SEM Industry: General | Top News
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