For months, smaller brands have been screaming that Google has been biased in their rollouts of penalties. It seems that Google is on a mission to prove that even big brands can’t get away with shady SEO. Just a few weeks ago, Expedia was penalized for poor SEO practices. An in depth look at their optimization practices shows that Expedia’s optimization team went for quantity over quality. From throwaway sites to spamming websites, everything you’re not supposed to do seemed to be exactly what Expedia did do. For such a big company, it truly was surprising to see just how poor their link building tactics were.
Expedia is fortunate that they can claim they didn’t know, supposedly. An investigation shows that a company called Myers Media Group has “provided SEO services to Expedia since 2007.” We’d hate to be those guys after the mess they’ve created.
(source: Link Research Tools)
Just a few short weeks later, Halifax.co.uk was knocked down a notch too. Halifax bank had the same issues as Expedia. Stupidity. The approach to their link building tactics was beyond absurd. One research paper claims that Halifax bank generated nearly half a million linking pages, but from only 189 websites. That means that each website that linked to Halifax averaged 2,645 backlinks.