Thursday, May 05, 2005

Bullying Search Engine Optimization, Inc uses legal threats to silence critics

Phillip Lenssen blogged some material about a "Search Engine Optimizer" (a company that helps web-developers inflate their rankings with search-engines) called Search Engine Optimization, Inc. The service had all but vanished from Google's database, and Phillip, a commentator on this industry, noted that this boded poorly for the company, indicating that they'd probably done something wrong to incur the wrath of Google (the "Google Death Penalty"), which meant that they ended up looking totally incompentent: not only couldn't they improve your site's PageRank, they couldn't get themselves ranked on Google.
The company responded with a threatening, bogus Cease-and-Desist letter telling Phillip that he had to take his page down or face legal action. Never mind that Phillip's post contained nothing actionable, he couldn't afford a lawsuit and poof, these bullies were able to censor their critics off the Internet.
Here's the stuff that they believe gives them grounds to sue Phillip. I think you'll agree that this is about as bogus a claim as we can imagine...

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