Can you hold a SEO-agency responsible for mistakes?

Johannes Beus
At an altitude of around 32.800 feet between Frankfurt and Seattle you get to thinking. About (missing) manners, strangely synchronized movies or the modus operandi of some SEO-agencies – which leads me straight to the point. For month, if not even years, everyone who is working full time with searchengine-optimization should be aware that Google is not accepting certain approaches to linkbuilding anymore. A large bloc is that of link-purchase and -sale, around which it got rather quiet recently, where the PageRank-depreciation for selling sites is continuing uninterruptedly. Besides this, Google primarily stopped accepting the links from web-catalogs and article-directories. If I take a look at the PageRank-changes for the last few days, I can find numerous pages with this pattern:

onlineshop-artikelverzeichnis.de. Old: 3, New: 0
artikel-liste.de. Old: 1, New: 0
artikelwand.de. Old: 3, New: 0

None of these are unscheduled PageRank-updates for the sites but manual depreciations. Google has stressed the point that the displayed PageRank is also a kind of communication device which shows which pages are trusted and which are not. It is hard to find a more distinct sign against this kind of web-catalogs and article-directories.

I got an email from a larger SEO-agency which asked for administrative access to a web-catalog that I started in the prehistoric days of the Internet, which I am not supporting anymore, so that they could enter their clients there without much stress. This led me to the question if this SEO-agencie's action already constitutes gross negligence and if this would be a reason for a customer to sue for damages if they received a punishment from Google? What do you think?
Johannes Beus - on Mon (06/02/2008) at 00:25 AM

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