It was recently posted in a column on http://searchengineland.com/suing-your-seo-agency-168370 that the first lawsuit was filed against an SEO firm.
Why?
Here’s a quoted summary:
“….Law firm Seikaly & Stewart had filed a lawsuit against The Rainmaker Institute seeking a return of their $49,000 in SEO fees and punitive damages under civil RICO. To the best of my knowledge, this is the largest and most public legal imbroglio involving aggressive performance claims, angry clients, SEO agencies and black hat tactics. To date, clients caught up in agency black hat shenanigans (JC Penney, anyone?) have expeditiously swept the news under the rug as soon as possible.”
RICO is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act created in 1970. We aren’t going to discuss further details on this act as you can Google this later. The main point here to be made is that the lawsuit was filed because of what is known as “Black Hat SEO” that was engaged in.
Black Hat SEO is unethical SEO used to get higher search rankings. These techniques are breaking the search engine rules, creating a poor user experience on a website or presenting content in a non-visual way to users.
We would like to stress the fact that SteerPoint has not, does not and will not participate in any Black Hat SEO tactics. As a business in the SEO business for several years now, we do not agree with these practices even though some tend to think doing this will result in short-term, high rankings. Let it be known that SteerPoint feels that those using these techniques really run the risk of being penalized by search engines.
At SteerPoint, our key focus with our clients is solutions that matter and performing Search Engine Optimization correctly.