In March 2007, we signed a term sheet with Mangrove who wanted to invest in Zlio..A few days after, I met a Google Executive who decided to buy the company. For the little story, Zlio, became blacklisted/sandboxed by Google 6 months after…. It killed the company…When I’ve taken a job at Zlio.com in 2007 to start their US operations, with Jeremie Berrebi as a CEO, I was really excited by the growth I was seeing. All signals were green : users, revenues, traction, VC funding. They had it all.
A week after I joined the company, Google sandboxed us, and we’ve lost 90% of our traffic. After months and months of work trying to solve our inbound traffic issue, we pretty much all gave up and decided to move on to other things.
Is it possible they were doing blackhat SEO, which got them banned from Google?
Otherwise, this sounds pretty damning for Google. I'm just trying to think of alternative theories. It seems like if Google were willing to act this way, they'd have a history of doing so. Do they?
EDIT: Yes, probably spam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4755386
When I’ve taken a job at Zlio.com in 2007 to start their US operations, with Jeremie Berrebi as a CEO, I was really excited by the growth I was seeing. All signals were green : users, revenues, traction, VC funding. They had it all.
A week after I joined the company, Google sandboxed us, and we’ve lost 90% of our traffic. After months and months of work trying to solve our inbound traffic issue, we pretty much all gave up and decided to move on to other things.
Is it possible they were doing blackhat SEO, which got them banned from Google?
Otherwise, this sounds pretty damning for Google. I'm just trying to think of alternative theories. It seems like if Google were willing to act this way, they'd have a history of doing so. Do they?
EDIT: Yes, probably spam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4755386