Spam SEO Company Traffic-Power, aka 1p.com, First Place, Internet Advertising Pros Options

[mikeb]

[Pinning this topic for now so that we don't get other questions about TP]
I found this forum while desperately searching for information. Thank you all in advance for any input.
I own a small e-commerce site. We have been in biz for over 5 years and over those years have done very, very well on Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. In fact, with no outside help but just by learning basic SEO techniques, I have managed to garner some nice Google stats. For example, for the search term "bodybuilding supplements", we have been #1 for over 3 years. Other examples are similar.

In early march we were contacted by an SEO firm who we decided to hire. At the time I felt their techniques were in a very gray area but went ahead with them.
Basically what they did was have me insert some code (all html) at the bottom of our page. The code was links, using 1px images that link to pages they created for us. These pages were ( I guess) doorway type pages that had some decent text and some no so decent text.

These pages actually got crawled and picked up by Google and within 8 weeks we had some good results, most were in the top 10. Once a person clicked on the search result in google, they were directed to this doorway page however the SEO firm used a mouseover so the customer was immediately sent to our home page.

As of Tues night, it seems we have been banned. Our PR5 is now PR0 and we are out of the database.

I am not sure this caused the problem but another of this companies customers is in a similar pickle.

My sales rep at the company said google is fixing a patch an one of their databases is down causing this problem. I frequent a usenet seo group and nobody has mentioned this. It sounds dubious.

I can show more detail on the technique used but this is long enough. My question is this: As I am assuming that what I did was the cause, I have removed the code. What are my chances of writing help or webmaster at google and asking for reinclusion. I want to come clean with them, tell them (honestly) that my intent was not to spam google and see if we can (someday) get our PR or listings back.

Anyone with input please help.

Thank you,
Mike Berg

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This post has been edited by Jill: Jul 13 2004, 10:00 PM