5 Of The Top SEO Disasters Ever

The obsession with getting traffic has sometimes driven content writers to the extremes as they strive to optimize their SEO. But if using black hat tactics can bring the desired results, why not give it a try. Breaking the rules has been quite disastrous in some cases. 

In 2011, Google discovered that Overstock.com; an online retailer was encouraging colleges and universities to embed links on their websites in exchange for discounts for their merchandise. This was actually a clever way to generate rank building schemes, with the flipside being that it made the information disorganized. Their choice was most definitely influenced by the fact that the academic websites use the .edu’ domain, which is quite authoritative. But such a choice made the information so mixed up and confusing. I mean, would it not be bewildering for the websites of academic institutions to have links to product pages of furniture and fashion accessories. Google definitely noticed and penalized overstock.com which made their revenues drop by $1.05 billion.

Rap Genius, a lyric website convinced a network of bloggers to include links to specific song lyrics on their site. The bloggers would then receive publicity in exchange. When Google discovered this and delivered their punishment, Rap Genius lost a whopping 80% of its daily organic traffic. Fortunately, this was short lived as they were reinstated back on Google search engine pages after deconstructing their link-building network and publicly admitting to their illegal SEO scheme. 

In 2006, BMW website, BMW.de used doorway pages to inflate their inbound links. A doorway page is a page that is usually created with the purpose of redirecting visitors to a parent page. This made them to rank higher for competitive keywords. BMW utilized some important keywords such as used car’ to create various doorway pages that linked to their main website; BMW.de. When Google discovered their infraction, they blacklisted the website which made them receive a 0 PageRank. 

In their quest to dominate the important keyword toy, Toys R Us paid $ 5.1 to get the toys.com domain name. They must have figured out that it will be a clever idea to have the popular keyword right in their domain name. But forgetting to redirect their 301 old URLs was such a gross mistake. When Google re-indexed the site, their search ranking for toys drastically dropped contrary to what they were expecting.

This was another link-building scheme; someone was paid to have several links placed on various websites which directly lead to JCPenny.com. The links targeted specific keywords such as evening dresses’ and casual dresses’ and appeared on various sites about different topics such as cars and online games. Google took notice quite fast and dropped the J. C Penny’s ranking within hours from #1 to #68.