Google Confirms TrafficPower Were Banned

In the second public "outing" of naughty web sites in the past week, Google has confirmed that SEO company TrafficPower and many of their client sites were banned from their index for breaking their webmaster guidelines. The Better Business Bureau has received over 100 complaints about TrafficPower in the past 36 months.

Matt Cutts, head of Web Spam at Google has given these reasons for going out on a limb to make an example of banned sites:

"I’ve found that it can assist webmasters to give concrete examples of violations of our quality guidelines.

This site is also useful because it allows me to give webmasters and site owners more information. For example, it lets me remind site owners of our search engine optimization (SEO) guidelines, which states that “you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire.” That means that if an SEO were to build doorway pages directly on your own domain, your site could be removed from Google as a result. For that reason, it’s important to do your research and to understand what actions an SEO company will be performing for you."

Good for Google for publicly confirming what most of us knew already. And congratulations to Aaron Wall who was just supplied with some heavy duty ammunition with which to fight his legal battle with TrafficPower.