Internet marketing, and SEO in particular, is a tricky business. There are many rules that you need to follow, and breaking those rules can carry dire consequences. For example, if you engage in black hat SEO practices (or hire an SEO company that does so) such as hiding text on your website, creating doorway pages, buying links, creating duplicate content, having multiple domains etc you can risk being caught out by Google and being shown the Google red card.
When Google shows you the red card, your website can suffer. What exactly can a Google penalty mean though and is it really that impactful on your website and your business as a whole?
When you consider that many websites (and yours really should be one of them) can receive as much as 90% of their traffic from search engines, imagine that traffic being taken away overnight. How much of a dent to your business would 90% fewer customers to your website create? Could your company survive that?
MediaCorp are one such company who felt the full force of the Google red card when two of their websites were penalised by Google (presumably not for a petulant flick out at an Argentine midfielder). The websites in question were creditcardexpert.co.uk and gambling.com. The reasons for the penalty weren’t revealed but you’d probably be along the right lines if you started by looking at some of the reasons mentioned above.
The penalty was imposed by Google in October 2007, and was lifted only this week, some two years later. What impact did this have on MediaCorp? Firstly, when the penalty was lifted, shares in the company rose 27%… a coincidence? Read on.
Before the penalty was imposed on gambling.com the website generated a £1.1 million margin for the year. After the penalty was imposed the margin fell to just £410,000, less than half of that earned the previous year.
Creditcardexpert.co.uk was a similar story, with a margin of £165,000 falling to just £73,000 after Google’s red card.
MediaCorp’s Justin Drummond believes that the Google penalty was hugely significant in his company’s profits and share price:
The removal of the Google penalty is a hugely significant event for Media Corp and should sharply increase the revenues derived from these two websites.
Gambling.com in particular is a major asset for Media Corp and the improvement in Google rankings combined with the imminent re-launch of www.gambling.com should see a marked improvement in revenues generated from these assets.
So before you decided to hire an SEO company, or to try your hand at SEO yourself, think about the damage that could be done to your company’s share price and profits if you engage in black hat SEO tactics. It doesn’t matter how big or how small your company, Google will penalise those websites that it finds to be in breach of its terms of service.
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[…] in 2007 and the penalty has lifted in October of 2009.Below you can find links with more info: https://www.engageweb.co.uk/how-damaging-can-a-google-penalty-really-be-to-your-business-1152.html From October of 2009, the gambling.com brand […]