Google is no enforcement body when it comes to law, and indeed, there’s nothing illegal about a company engaging in questionable SEO practices. These practices are unethical purely because they distort search engine results – not because they’re likely to harm anybody. However, when a major SEO company is officially removed from Google’s index along with domains they have promoted, it’s bad news.

Matt Cutts officially announced this major ban, with support from Google and their legal counsel, in his personal blog:

I can confirm that Google has removed traffic-power.com and domains promoted by Traffic Power from our index because of search engine optimization techniques that violated our webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/ webmasters/guidelines.html.

It’ll be a major challenge for Traffic Power to find customers now! The publicity surrounding this kind of ban can’t readily be more damaging to any other industry. And the fallout will just keep coming – not only will Traffic Power not be likely to come up in Google search results, if anybody does a search on their name they’re most likely to come up with documents very much like this one. It’s unlikely that a potential customer will be likely to consider Traffic Power after reading this!