News out this week highlighted the importance of finding the right partner for your internet marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO). The consequences of making the wrong decision and hiring someone who turns out to use techniques, known in the trade as blackhat practises, can have dire consequences. Blackhat techniques include keyword stuffing, the use of doorway pages, invisible text, multiple domains, duplicated content and many others, in an attempt to trick search engines to place websites higher up the results.

Media Corporation are the owners of two sites, gambler.com and creditcardexpert.co.uk, that were penalised by Google. The penalty resulted in their site being virtually axed completely from all search results. The sites were still found, users often just had to click through to page 10 to find them. This resulted in a fraction of visitors clicking through to their sites. Google rarely makes public the reasons for penalising, but you can be pretty sure it was because they were caught using some of the techniques listed above. The news this week that Google had lifted the penalty on the two sites resulted in a frenzy of stock market activity, and the share price of Media Corporation increasing by over 200% in just two days.

The cost of the penalty is clear from the drop in profits made from the sites. Prior to the penality, gambler.com was pulling in £1.1 million a year. Profits dropped by over 60% to just £410,000 in the year after the penality was imposed.

A similar result happened at creditcardexpert.co.uk, where the company made £175,000 in the year before the penalty. This dropped to just £73,000.

There is a long and famous history of Google penalising companies when it thinks they have tried to manipulate search results, and size does not seem to be a barrier. Google famously penalised BMW in February 2006 when they claimed to have found the company using doorway pages. BMW admitted the technique. Google has even penalised itself. In February of this year, Google (the US company) penalised Google Japan (its own subsidiary) for blackhat practises.

If you want to try your hand at SEO, or decide to hire a company to do it for you, make sure you understand the risks of doing something that could cause severe damage to your business.