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Unfortunately, disputes happen more often than we'd all like between business owners and their web designers, web hosts, and SEO or other marketing agencies. We recently wrote a humorous story about a designer that didn't get paid and what he did to the bar website in retaliation for non-payment. However, most of the time the disputes aren't funny at all. Take this one for example. In the Google webmaster help forums, a business owner had this to say - "I gave 2 months notice to a SEO company that I was moving my services to another provider. They were obviously not very happy and I was sent an email today saying they have stopped all work and have cancelled the contract immediately. Two hours later I can't find my site in Google, when it was there this morning. This isn't fair as I was indexed before working with them. Can they do this? Could they have de-indexed my site? How can I cancel that request? My business relies on the internet for clients... I am desperate!" Ouch. That hurts. Perhaps the rouge SEO firm had access to the Google webmaster tools, and tweaked some settings. A change in country designation of the website could have caused this. Or, if the SEO firm had access to the web hosting account, they could have changed the robots.txt settings for the website. Regardless of how this unscrupulous SEO company hurt their ex-clients website rankings, it just highlights a theme I'm sure you've picked up in this blog. Namely, keep control of all your website assets and passwords. Web hosting and domains should be in your name, and under your control. This will help you avoid being a victim if there's some sort of dispute with one of your service providers. Fired SEO Firm Takes Business Owners Website Out of Google Search Results
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