WebPosition Gold and Google- The SAGA:

Penalize you for using web position gold: (April 2003) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/12118.htm
Google and position checking software: (Jan 2003) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/8573.htm
Whats the status of Google vs WPG Users? (July 2002) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/1231.htm
What exactly gets banned using WebPositionGold; (June 2004) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/4799.htm
Web Position Gold & Google IP bans (May 2009) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum39/3337.htm

By the way, it isn’t just web position gold.  It seems that every rank checking tool out there has been affected by this.  There’s a number of people who think it’s silly for Google to be blocking access to rank checkers.  But I’m pretty sure I know why they are doing it now.  Rank Checkers have a huge impact on “impressions” and skew the search data significantly.  As Google uses this data more and more, they have a strong motivation to make sure their impression data is more accurate for search results.

Now I didn’t realize the extent to how serious Google was about this until I started coding up a tool to do better rank checking and was very confused because code I wrote a few months ago started to break.  I thought Google changed the web page and they changed the web page.  But it wasn’t for everyone.  They changed it ONLY for wget.  Specifically, they removed the rank data from the link just for my wget requests.  EVIL.  I mimiced a real request and sure enough, the rank data came back in.  Pretty crazy stuff.

It’s not until you’re in a situation where someone is attacking your honor where you realize that Google has a lot of power over what others think of you and your company.  Here is an example one company, absolutepoker.com which literally got devastated by other a few people who were very mad at them.  They decided to advertise under their name to get top placement for their absolutepokercheats.com site and the following is what happened.

This was quickly becoming a public relations nightmare.  So what can you do when something like this happens?  Well, in the world of SEO, there are a few things you can do to mitigate the damage immediately.  It comes down to pulling down the value of the page or bringing up the value of your pages so that the listing gets pushed off of the first page.

But this is only part of the solution.  In an ideal situation, you will have proactively spent resources in making sure that anything listed under your name or company are high ranking pages that YOU control. That means that it becomes very difficult for someone to get themselves associated with your company that you don’t want, but more importantly, you can respond to threats to your reputation because you have a number of strategically placed pages where you can do damage control.  Online reputation management is quickly becoming a new essential tool for public relations and media management.

The truth is that many online businesses can truly benefit from great SEO, but after being burned by cheaper vendors promising wild guarantees and overcharging with very little results, most people are reluctant to continue with SEO.

Our goal is to blow away misconceptions in the SEO industry, guide people to better ranking, and when you’re ready to take your online marketing to the next level give you the information you need so we can get you there.