Beware of Gadgets

I recently read an inspiring and depressing story about a top SEO programmer. He had written a popular gadget that everybody seemed to download and put into their web pages. His gadget linked back to his dating site. He built up over 500,000 inbound links due to this gadget marketing.

He did this work for his company. When they found out how successful it had been, they had him change his gadget to link some pay day loans web sites. Apparently Google caught on to this, considered it spam, and his web sites took a huge hit as a result. This alone is a sad story.

Here comes the kicker. The dude appealed the Google decision. And as a result, he got a manual review from none other than Matt Cutts himself. Matt did a lot of research before making his decision. And apparently he found out that it appeared that the Gadget programmer had intentionally left a lot of critical and incriminating details out of his appeal. As a result, Matt stayed the Google decision. Now this Gadget programmer is owned. The million inbound links amount to nothing. I just hope the poor guy does not get fired.

Note to self - check out Gadget programming to get inbound links to my site. Note #2 to self - don't be spammy.