On March 7th, Google acquired BeatThatQuote.com. The attention of the acquisition got SEOs to call out that BeatThatQuote was violating Google’s webmaster guidelines and led to the site being penalized by Google.

Then yesterday, I reported BeatThatQuote was no longer penalized, at least that was until they were found to still be violating Google’s guidelines.

Now if you look at the [beatthatquote] search results, beatthatquote.com is not in the first spot anymore. So Google penalized the site they own again! Did you get all of that?

Google bought a web site, penalized it a day later, then removed the penalty two weeks later and now a day after the penalty was removed, they penalized it again!

Postscript: A Google spokesperson told us, “we strive to enforce our webmaster guidelines across all websites, even websites owned and operated by Google.”

Hat tip to Rishil for spotting this first.

Related Entries:

• Two Weeks Later, Google Lifts Ban On BeatThatQuote
• Google To Acquire BeatThatQuote.com
• Google Bans Itself Again By Banning BeatThatQuote.com
• Official: Google On How & When Ranking Penalties Are Removed
• AdWords Cloaks Its Help Pages, Gets Banned By Google
• Google Penalizes Google Japan For Buying Links

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Google: Webmaster Central | SEO: Spamming

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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