I don't want to get all nuts and bolts on this, but it was basically described as "the magic dust we sprinkle on sites". It was a series of links pointed to a site that was supposed to help with Google. Part of the algorithm that turns out search results for Google is how many links point to your site. Each time a link is pointed at a site, it's like a vote of confidence from that other site, so Google assumes that it is relevant, and the site that the link is pointed to is given a little bump in the search results.
I knew that inbound linking was important. I knew a lot of stuff about search engine optimization, but really only what my company taught me. So I wasn't out there reading magazines, or even Google's own webmaster guidelines. I was out there selling these packages for $600+ per month to get people's sites ranked. Thank god I only sold two of them.
After a sub-par June and July I was back in "make your number or we'll fire you" territory. By this time I had worked my way out of that scenario three times, and wasn't sweating it. I actually made my month in the first week of August, and got on a plane to go to our meeting in Vegas. Things were great.
They were talking about a blog posting when I got there. Apparently some little Canadian blog (oilman.ca) had said some nasty stuff about our product. I wrote him off as another guy who hated our company because we were awesome and got drunk for three days in Vegas. I was at my number on the 7th of the month...why worry.
I got home and read the blog. Erg. This isn't good.
I read Google's guidelines on selling links. Forgive the acronym, but my jaw hit the floor as I the words represented by OMFG ran through my head at a dizzying pace.
The most crippling thing about all of this to me was that I felt like I had been lied to. Let me sum up the above two links:
The blog basically said "FindLaw is filthy because they sell links". The Google guidelines banned the EXACT practice that we were doing...selling links with the intent of transferring page rank.
So the lie I was basically told was that we were on the up and up, and this was all a misunderstanding. That's what they said at the meeting, and content with being at my number, and drunk as I was in Vegas, I accepted it. I was in the room with the SEO manager when this product got dreamed up. Unlike 80% of the people selling it, I completely understood it, I simply had NO IDEA that it was against Google's guidelines.
The company's position was pretty straightforward. We aren't going to address this because we did nothing wrong. If you say anything about this to your clients, you will be fired. Wait...what? we'll be fired? For what? I was disappointed, confused, angry... Three days later the VP of sales called me. This little napoleon complex f-stick and I never got along. I was busy trying to do things right, he was busy trying to convince people he was much bigger than his 5'2" frame. Whatever. So he called me because someone named James commented on the blog. It wasn't me, so I denied it. He said "that would be an unfortunate way to lose your job", a poorly veiled threat, in my opinion.
So I'm going to try to get to the end of this story as it's boring me, which means you probably aren't reading it anymore. This whole process robbed me of everything (related to the company) that I believed in. It was a complete and total scam. We got our hands caught in the cookie jar, and at a time that we didn't know what effect this was going to have on our site, or more importantly, our client's sites, we decided to do nothing. We had people who were paying upwards of $5,000 per month to our company, and for all we knew their sites were about to fall off (Matt Cutts knew about this whole deal) the face of the earth....our decision was not only to completely ignore this issue, but one step further, you would be FIRED if they knew you so much as discussed this with your clients.
That's okay. I was just going to ignore it, and keep on selling normal sites without the bad SEO add-on (which they CONTINUED to sell, they still do today) and I was going to make my number, and a lot of money.
Things were going to work out....
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