Home Scandal and Gossip Ryan Abood wants to warn you- ” Don’t ever f*ck with Google.”

Ryan Abood wants to warn you- ” Don’t ever f*ck with Google.”

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How losing $4 million in business taught Ryan Abood never to ever cross Google ever again.

Like most merchants, Ryan Abood was getting a lot of his business through the web, but then Ryan hit on a brilliant idea. What if he could optimize his way up the google ladder, effectively by-passing a lot of competitors and appearing number one on a natural google search for gift bags. So he hired a couple of search optimization outfits and let them do their ‘thing.’ Soon he was really bringing in the bacon but then one morning Mr Abood woke up to find himself banished from Google and his business in free fall. What happened? Mr Abood had effectively ‘gamed’ the system and once Google caught wind Mr Abood was sent to internet purgatory…

Inc.com: I called the two companies we hired to improve our ranking. In the past, I’d done all our search-engine optimization myself. But as we grew, we started paying companies to reach out to relevant sites and ask them for links. Instead, one of the companies admitted it was paying for links. Google looks at that like buying an election.

Buying an election although technically illegal in real life politics and the way most candidates actually end up winning elections, (never mind laws that effectively let anyone donate what they like to a candidate) is an overlooked ‘anomaly’ is not considered as such in the autocratic internet empire run by Google. According to Google, if they so much as smell you gaming the system you can pretty much assure yourself that unless you have a cushion of savings you will be filing for bankruptcy real soon…

Gawker: Abood kind of had it coming. The proprietor of GourmetGiftBaskets.com had been indirectly buying links to boost his position in Google search results, a big no no in the Google rulebook, he writes in Inc. magazine. But the rulebreaking was inadvertent; Abood said he had paid for ethical search engine optimization only, and one of the two companies (!) he hired to boost his search ranking broke with that policy. The entrepreneur was hardly a Google-gaming pro, in fact he had only thought to dabble in what’s known as “SEO” after noticing that his parents’ flower shop had done a tidy gift basket business thanks to its organic Google rank.

Mr Abood went on to lose $4 million before this June Google took him out of purgatory and today Mr Abood makes sure he stays as close as possible on Google’s good side and the top of its search results by tweetering and blogging about the business he is in. Something Google will let you do assuming you are no longer buying links along the way. Thankfully for Mr Abood he has learned his lesson and is one assumes back to a thriving business…



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