Attorneys File RICO Lawsuit Against SEO Agency for Spammy SEO Practices

[Linda Buquet]

Just found this. Meant to post earlier.

Goes to show you spammy practices can do more than hurt the client...
They can come back to bite you too!

Attorneys File RICO Lawsuit Against Law Firm Marketing Company for Spammy SEO Practices - Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

Search engine optimization company The Rainmaker Institute, which markets its services to law firms and bills itself as a "law firm marketing provider", has found itself on the receiving end of a RICO lawsuit for providing SEO services that violated Google's webmaster guidelines.

From the complaint it seems that at issue is the type of links that The Rainmaker Institute was using to link to their client sites. There are mentions of auto-generated links, and the links from what appears to be blog spam, as well as links that were poor quality, with the vast majority of them created through link farming techniques. It seems to have been hit by the Google Penguin updates.

The Rainmaker Institute also continued to sell the same services to more law firms, even after it was aware of that their practices violated Google's guidelines.

RICO is pretty serious stuff!

Here is the actual legal complaint. And here is just one quote from it.

"The action is based on the fact that, at the time that the defendants were promoting this marketing scheme to the Victim Firms, they knew that the techniques they proposed to use were in violation of the guidelines already well-established and published by Google; knew that Google was moving rapidly to crack down on violators; knew that use of these techniques would not only fail to enhance the likelihood that the Victim Firms would rise in Google's rankings but would actually be downgraded to the point where the websites being used by the Victim Firms would become 'contaminated' for search engine purposes; knew that they intended to use automated programs rather than direct personal effort to create the appearance that links to the Victim Firms web pages (the key to rising in search engine rankings) were being generated in the numbers represented; and knew that they intended to cloak their schemes in allegations of 'trade secrets' to avoid the balance of the scheme from coming to light."

Spammers and scammers usually get it in the end!

Market with integrity and everyone wins!