I came across a disturbing thread on the Google Webmaster Help Forum where a website owner claimed that the day after he was laid off from his SEO firm, his site disappeared from Google, meaning it disappeared completely.
He said:
We notified our SEO firm two months ago that we were moving our services to another provider. They were obviously not very happy and today they stopped all work and got an email saying they canceled the contract immediately.2 hours later my site was there this morning and it was found on google not. I was indexed before working with them, so this is not fair. can they do this? Could they have deindexed my site? How can I cancel that request? My business depends on the internet for my clients… I’m hopeless!
Can you imagine?
What did the SEO company do to quickly de-index this guy’s site? Well, it depends on the access they have. They may have blocked the spider and issued a removal request via Google Webmaster Tools.
If you fire an SEO company, you should ensure that the SEO company cannot access your site, your webmaster tools login, or anything else that could harm you. The SEO firm had to warn the client that this could technically happen.
I’ve seen some SEO companies threaten to ban your site if you don’t quit or hire them. I’ve also seen SEOs retaliate when their clients trick them.
This is a lesson for both website owners and SEOs, so be careful and tell your new clients to be careful.
Forum discussion on Google Webmaster Help.
UPDATE: The support from the SEO community to help this guy is huge and I hope the site will be relisted soon.
