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Google Lifts Ban On iAcquire; Company Blogs Of Being Reformed

Danny Sullivan on July 28, 2012 at 11:57 am

iAcquire, banned by Google in late May after allegations of buying links for clients, has now has been restored to the Google index after two months. The company has blogged about the news and changes to its business model.

iAcquire never says itself that it was banned over buying links for clients. Instead, it uses the “financial compensation” euphemism it has used before. From the post:

Google’s war on paid links came close to home when we were accused of buying links for clients, which subsequently led to Google’s big hand swinging hard on the back of our head.

We admitted that for some clients we had allowed the use of financial compensation as one of our many tactics to build links. I mean, it’s hard to build links, and clients want to be aggressive and they want to rank.

The post also suggests that purchasing links was widespread among SEO agencies:

Few of you can say that when you saw iAcquire in the press you didn’t say “oh crap, that’s a big move – let’s do an audit of our own policies.” And, you can’t tell me your clients didn’t start asking questions about your own services and tactics. We got called to the table, and we had to pay the piper

As for iAcquire, the post suggests is that paid links are no longer done, something the company said at the end of May that it was abandoning:

For those customers that have wanted to stay aggressive and not seek better ways to win in search; we can no longer offer the brute force model facilitated by payments to webmasters. Playing by the rules is something we are doing, and we’ve all but broken our own backs to make things right post de-indexation.

However, when iAcquire’s co-owner Joe Griffin emailed me late on Friday to share the news, he said:

We are still working on some clean up items….

I’m not sure if that means the company is completely done now with paid links or not. I’ll follow-up with Griffin when he returns from his vacation and do a separate post with a further update.

About The Author

Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, MarTech Today and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.