What’s the deal with Traffic Power?
I see them here, I see them there, I see them damn well everywhere! I’m talking about Traffic Power here which, before the recent controversy, I’d never even heard of. So then, who are they? A quick look at their own website show that they are a provider of services to website owners, things like Search Engine Placement, Merchant Associate Programs, Affiliate Tracking and World Power.
World Power?!? That’s an odd one. Ah, I see translation and stuff. Nothing to worry about like an illuminati style global domination scheme. Anyways, rewind there… “Search Engine Placement” is where the controversy lies. In fact, check out their own lack of placement. And it isn’t just their own lack of placement that is the problem. It seems their customers have dived bombed out of the listings. The anonymous owner of TrafficPowerSucks.com starts off with this foreboding infocommercial:
Have you been contacted by a company called
Traffic-Power? Did they promise you “guaranteed
results” and tell you how they could get you listed at
the top of Google?
Don’t believe everything they tell you.
It seems he was offerered a guarenteed service and even worse than not delivering, his site no longer exists in the eyes of Google. I won’t stay on his site too long, the lack of name and site details make me want to look elsewhere.
That “elsewhere” is the blog of Matt Cutts and if you can’t trust him, who can you trust? He rarely speaks out on individual cases, but has decided to here due to allegations what I won’t get into. What he does have to say however is:
I’d like to address those two points. I can confirm that Google has removed traffic-power.com and domains promoted by Traffic Power from our index because of search engine optimization techniques that violated our webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. If you are a client or former client of Traffic Power and your site is not in Google, please see my previous advice on requesting reinclusion into Google’s index to learn what steps to take if you would like to be reincluded in Google’s index.
Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice in Wonderland would say. Now I really REALLY want to know what TP did to their customers. Not only did THEY go down, all their customers went down with them.
“At Traffic-Power.com we use our expertise and technological know-how to get top search engine placement. ” That’s what they say. I’d really love to get into what some of this expertise and know-how actually is. But it seems that anyone writing about it online have backed down and deleted their posts. There are vague mentions of doorway pages (which some large German companies have been slapped on the write for recently) and “fake forums” but nothing solid. Whatever it was, they fell foul of Google’s webmaster guidelines and that’s a big NO-NO.
One of the largest ironies in the whole saga is that Traffic Power promoted themselves using cold calling techniques and not through natural search engine traffic.
Lessons learnt here when hiring an SEO firm are not to believe what they say on face value, get a written contract. Also get an idea of the kind of work they are carrying out, if they won’t tell you or you are at all uncomfortable with what they propose then back out and don’t enter into contract with them.
If you’re unlucky enough to have been one of their customers then what can you do? Well you need to undo all the bad they did. Then when you’re happy with that, file a reinclusion request with Google themselves. Either that, or move to another site and recreate your business there - if you get your old site back in the SERPs then you can also redirect it all to the new place. Get active and get back in the race!
This is a repost of an article I originally wrote for ThirdSquare