Traffic Power was a
Las Vegas
Las Vegas, colloquially referred to as Vegas, is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Nevada and the county seat of Clark County. The Las Vegas Valley metropolitan area is the largest within the greater Mojave Desert, and second-l ...
,
Nevada
Nevada ( ; ) is a landlocked state in the Western United States. It borders Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. Nevada is the seventh-most extensive, th ...
search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of Web traffic, website traffic to a website or a web page from web search engine, search engines. SEO targets unpaid search traffic (usually referred to as ...
company that engaged in
black hat techniques. These were
spamdexing
Spamdexing (also known as search engine spam, search engine poisoning, black-hat search engine optimization, search spam or web spam) is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It involves a number of methods, such as link building ...
practices that violated
Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
's webmaster guidelines. As a result, some Traffic Power clients have been banned from Google's
organic search
In web search engines, organic search results are the query results which are calculated strictly algorithmically, and not affected by advertiser payments. They are distinguished from various kinds of sponsored results, whether they are explicit pa ...
results.
According to a
Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' (''WSJ''), also referred to simply as the ''Journal,'' is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscriptio ...
profile of the company, Traffic Power used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients.
Wired
Wired may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Music
* ''Wired'' (Jeff Beck album), 1976
* ''Wired'' (Hugh Cornwell album), 1993
* ''Wired'' (Mallory Knox album), 2017
* "Wired", a song by Prism from their album '' Beat Street''
* "Wired ...
reported that Traffic Power sued blogger Aaron Wall and the website Traffic Power Sucks for stating that they were banned.
Wired Magazine
''Wired'' is a bi-monthly American magazine that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. It is published in both print and Online magazine, online editions by Condé Nast. The magazine has been in public ...
Legal Showdown in Search Fracas
Sep, 08, 2005, written by Adam L. Penenberg Google software engineer
Matt Cutts
Matthew Cutts (born 1972 or 1973) is an American software engineer. Cutts is the former Administrator of the United States Digital Service. He was first appointed as acting administrator, to later be confirmed as full administrator in October 2 ...
later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.
In January 2009 Traffic Power CEO Matt Marlon was jailed on accusations of fraud related to a
foreclosure
Foreclosure is a legal process in which a lender attempts to recover the balance of a loan from a borrower who has Default (finance), stopped making payments to the lender by forcing the sale of the asset used as the Collateral (finance), coll ...
scam.
[{{cite web , publisher=kvbc.com , title=Accused foreclosure scam artist behind bars , url=http://www.kvbc.com/Global/story.asp?S=7569200&nav=15MV , accessdate=2009-01-20 , url-status=dead , archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20081014053832/http://www.kvbc.com/Global/story.asp?S=7569200&nav=15MV , archivedate=October 14, 2008]
References
Black hat search engine optimization
Search engine optimization companies