I found this recent situation interesting and wanted to share it with you. A past blogging client told me that his SEO firm advised him that his website had been nailed with the Google Panda update and they could no longer help him. It turns out that when his website was built by a team in India that they simply grabbed content from other websites out on the web and pasted it into his pages.
When I ran CopyScape on a few of his products, I found many sites that had the same content. This kind of situation is not easy to fix. It will require time and money to buy new unique content. Although not every Indian web service firm will do this to you, if you are using an Indian firm learn from this lesson and assure and then verify that the content you have bought will do you good and not harm. The key is to trust but verify!
This client now has a 1,300 page nightmare to fix that may take thousands of dollars to fix the problem. He may be forced into promoting his website only using Google AdWords as there will be no way to ever garner organic placement in this new world of Google.
Placement on Google is based on the criteria that Google decides, you can’t buy it, but you can earn it by not taking short cuts and focusing on unique content and creating value for readers.