You had me until "I called the two companies we hired to improve our ranking." Google did not cost you $4 million, the fact that you were spamming Google did. As it very well should.
His site still looks like SEO spam so I'm not sure he learned his lesson. There are tons of content-less pages to keyword stuff like this:<p><a href="http://www.gourmetgiftbaskets.com/Gift-Baskets-Cleveland-Oh.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.gourmetgiftbaskets.com/Gift-Baskets-Cleveland-Oh....</a><p>I also find it odd that every page features 20 logos from media outlets. That doesn't get them anything and I seriously doubt mentioning the Colbert Report helps sell gift baskets.<p>Link trading is still advertised, which seems risky considering that's very close to what got them in trouble in the first place.<p><a href="http://www.gourmetgiftbaskets.com/partners.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.gourmetgiftbaskets.com/partners.htm</a>
I'm pretty sure I know the specific SEO that broke Google's guidelines and paid for links that pass PageRank, which led to this site not ranking as highly. But I'll leave it to the gift basket company to see if they want to call out which SEO it was that got them into trouble.
I have 60000 fans on my facebook page and it doesn't really help me. So when I hear about ~3000 fans, I don't see how you can do something of it. Same remark for tweeter
I'm not defending the dodgy SEO company but I think a lot of people forget that for a long time buying links was a perfectly "normal" practice and was not penalised by Google (it was a grey area, but at the time - everyone was doing it). Then Google ran an update and lots of sites got penalised for doing it.<p>In this guys case, it may not even have been an update that did it, but the results of their competition sending a report to Google's web spam team - I've seen this happen to people I've built sites for in the past. It's a morally questionable tactic, but I've seen sites benefit by focusing on bringing their opponents down rather than boosting their own ranking.
I bet this guy now would be willing to pay Google $100K+/year for personalized escalation services should such an issue arise again. What if Google had one set of rules for every site it crawled, but offered a personalized appeals process for those who paid up? I'm not sure if I like the idea or not. Let's presume that any "penalty box" algorithms end up (A) wrongly punishing some and (B) incorrectly ignoring others. What if Google's search results changed as a result of this "court only for those who pay" policy such that only those in Category A who didn't pay up were excluded? Would Google's evilness be reduced compared to the current state of affairs? Of course, Google would be less evil if it offered everyone their day in court for free.
I have to admit, I hate seeing SEO posts submitted here. Not because I don't like them, but because of the ignorance so many of you show towards any use or mention of SEO.<p>SEO isn't bad, Google themself has an SEO guide they released for webmasters. Building links is not a bad thing, Google created the entire link building game by relying on them for determining ranking.<p>Some of you need to step down from your damn pedestal and realize that marketing makes money. No one is going to link to your site if they don't know it exists. Link building and SEO is not illegal, and is a very valid way to make money.<p>I would imagine the vast majority of you have nowhere near enough experience to even comment on the use of SEO as opposed to when it comes to something like another Haskell VS. OCaml post.<p>EDIT: for misuse of a word