It seems that Google has banned bigmouthmedia.com from it’s index. If you search for the domain name there are no results returned and the PR of the website has also been brought down to 0.
What is important from the point of view of study are the reasons why this has happened. From the perspective of “on page” optimization, it seems that they had a large amount of hidden text on their homepage, hidden with a javascript css overide.
Whether there were any “off page” factors due to any linking practices that also had a hand to play in this ban, remains to be seen.
It is interesting that there seem to be many more websites out there, using more obvious and blatant Black Hat techniques, but still enjoying their place and rankings on Google.
For firms getting their SEO carried out, the way you carry out optimization (both on page and off page) has become significantly more important at this point of time. As Google is slowly but surely catching up with the various black hat techniques, and is becoming more finicky of how optimization is carried out, it has become imperative to have totally ethical techniques for promotion of a website.
Even for site owners having inhouse SEO capabilities, it would be a good idea to also monitor what the teams are doing or laying out clearly not to use any known technique which can get you in trouble – you wouldn’t want to be caught off guard, thrown out of the Google index, due to some SEO methods used by one of your SEO staff members eager to show you results. The implications are more real now. It also draws caution to the claims of companies which “guarantee” results. The means are becoming equally important (if not more) than the end results.
In times to come, I am sure that these quality guidelines of Search Engines would become more strict.
I don’t think I have heard of any major news of Yahoo and MSN banning websites, the way Google does.
