Sadly, there can be some pretty immoral people in the world, including a lack of business ethics. It seems that an SEO firm and its client disagreed over a work contract and the client wanted to break up. The SEO firm is said to have decided to completely sabotage the company on Google search.
There are client complaints in the Google Webmaster Help Thread. He told the SEO firm he was “considering discontinuing service with them.”An hour later, the SEO firm took ownership of his listing on his Google My Business Marked as closed. Shortly thereafter, this his website was also removed from Google using the Google Search Console’s emergency removal feature.
A Google product expert said, “It looks like you removed your site from search using Google Search Console. This is an emergency feature designed to remove a site, page, or directory from search almost immediately. Yes.” However, he added, “Good news. It can be undone very quickly.”
A lot of people gave advice to this guy in the thread, and the owner seems to have been able to keep the SEO company and Google tools out of the site.
But things like this happened all too often. We have previously seen attempts to hold his SEO clients hostage through SEO threats. Google says it can be ignored when it comes to negative SEO, but this goes beyond negative SEO. The case above was direct access to remove a site and business from Google Search.
So be careful when hiring an SEO company. They can literally do so much damage and you need to trust them before handing over such access to your business to them.
Forum discussion on Google Webmaster Help.
