On January 2, 2008 a story appeared on the Search Engine Watch Blog that rattled the SEO community and made website owners understandably nervous. Matt Marlon, CEO of Traffic Power, had been jailed for allegedly running a housing foreclosure scam. Using four different aliases and 45 corporations, he allegedly convinced homeowners that he could save them from foreclosure. Not only did Marlon not really buy their houses or pay off their mortgages, he also, according to the SEW blog, "would get the rightful owners out of the house under false pretenses and would... rent the houses to tenants."Such tactics did not bode well for his SEO clients either: he was also accused of using black hat tricks to secure favorable rankings for Traffic Power's clients. Matt Cutts of Google confirmed that the company site, traffic-power.com, and the domains that the company promoted were removed from Google's index due to violations of Google's webmaster guidelines. The owners of the now-blacklisted sites are left with the task of taking the necessary steps to re-include their pages in Google.
It all amounts to the same thing: SEO is a breeding ground for scam artists. Don't let yourself be caught by one of them.
-R. Keefe
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