SEOGoogle Slaps Marketing Company Portent for Unnatural Links

Google Slaps Marketing Company Portent for Unnatural Links

Ian Lurie, Chairman and Principal of Seattle-based marketing company Portent, revealed today that his company received a manual spam action notice for unnatural links from Google. His site now can be found on Page 60 of Google.

yellow-penalty-flagAnother day, another penalty to report. Ian Lurie, Chairman and Principal of Seattle-based marketing company Portent, revealed today his company received a manual spam action notice for unnatural links from Google. His site now can be found on Page 60 of Google.

Lurie shared a few theories as to why Portent was penalized in a blog post today revealing the penalty. It could be because one of his ex-client’s sites was hacked, resulting in 59,000 pages of spam pointing at Portent, or perhaps it’s due to several sitewide links all with exact match anchor text of “Internet marketing by portent”.

A couple additional theories have been discussed on Twitter.

Portent recently underwent a redesign, perhaps prompting a manual review by Google. PushFire CEO Rae Hoffman tweeted that this would be the second time in a week she’s heard about a redesign triggering a Google penalty.

One other possibility is that, considering the timing, the penalty Google just handed to Ann Smarty’s guest blog network MyBlogGuest may have impacted Portent. Lurie tweeted: “it looks like we have 2-3 posts we did using a service that just got penalized. Could that have done it?”

Regardless, Lurie is taking the news surprisingly well.

“I’m actually laughing really hard at the irony,” Lurie wrote. “We’re so white hat we’ve been repeatedly fired because of poor link acquisition. The only person I know in the industry who’s a bigger white hat tactics proponent than me is Rand (sorry, Rand, if you get penalized by association).”

So far, none of Portent’s clients have been impacted, Lurie reported. He promised to continue reporting on his attempts to get the penalty lifted as “the ultimate case study.” I know I’ll be following this one with interest.

Resources

The 2023 B2B Superpowers Index

whitepaper | Analytics The 2023 B2B Superpowers Index

8m
Data Analytics in Marketing

whitepaper | Analytics Data Analytics in Marketing

10m
The Third-Party Data Deprecation Playbook

whitepaper | Digital Marketing The Third-Party Data Deprecation Playbook

1y
Utilizing Email To Stop Fraud-eCommerce Client Fraud Case Study

whitepaper | Digital Marketing Utilizing Email To Stop Fraud-eCommerce Client Fraud Case Study

1y