It's what I've been saying for years: there is no easy, guaranteed way to get on top of the search engines. Maybe you can get there for a day, a week or a month, but after that, you're toast. Hundreds of businesses are finding that out right now as Google drops them -- hook, line and sinker -- from its search results. It's every website owner's nightmare -- not one of those businesses can be found in a Google search any longer and they may be dropped from other major search engines as well.
What happened? One of those search engine wonder companies, the ones that promise high ranking through their patented techniques, has been caught red-handed trying to manipulate the Google index. Google fought back by dropping not only their site, but all of their clients' sites. It's not really hard to see it coming when you look at the facts.
The Company: traffic-power.com; one of those so-called guarantee companies.
The Scam: Traffic Power created pages full of nothing but keywords, submitted these pages to the search engines, then redirected visitors to the actual site. The search engine would see the page full of keywords. A visitor coming from Google would see one of Traffic Power's clients. Sometimes the two matched; sometimes they didn't. Doesn't matter -- that's called spamming a search engine and its against policy for all of them.
The Link Farm: Traffic Power also created artificial link popularity for their clients by forcing all clients to link to each other. This created more inbound links for each site, raising the site's page rank to a higher level than justified. This may be the part that got all the client sites booted.
The result: Matt Cutts, Google representative, has confirmed that traffic-power.com and all client sites of traffic-power.com have been removed from the Google index. While Google has removed other sites in the past and just as rapidly reinstated them following changes to their methods, don't hold your breath waiting for these hundreds of illicitly promoted sites to get back in the index. Google is in no particular rush.
The lesson: Make sure you know what (if anything) your web host, your web designer and your SEO consultant are doing to help boost your site's rankings. Be on top of it, and if it sounds shady, stop it.
YOU are responsible for both what you and your search engine consultant do. It is the client website that will ultimately pay the price for choosing the quick-and-easy scheme over the long, drawn-out process of building site rankings.
Dontcha love being able to take the high road? :)