Already for some months some people in Germany from the more modern part of the local SEO scene started a link bait campaign to rank in the top 10 for the term SEO its self. They published a site for a presumably fictional Borat-like character called String Emil. He was called String because, like Borat in one of his more famous pics, he wore a string tanga. String Emil Online, short SEO was already in the Top 5 and even survived the Google bombing filter.

Now the site has been apparently penalized. It is wiped out of the index even for the phrase string emil its self.

It was a funny stunt and the "manipulation" was not really black hat or something. People linked to String Emil just because it was so weird. The same effect that Borat acomplished. So now it seems that Google will punish anyone who attempts to use the PageRank algorithm in other ways than intended by Google. Even if almost no harm is done. Indeed I thought it was a nice idea having something else than SEO in the top 10 for the term.

I did not take part in the whole campaign so I am not concerned about it for my own sake.

Check out the site:
www.string-emil.de
It has no results with the site:-operator
http://www.google.de/search?q=site:www.string-emil.de
It has a cache result though
http://72.14.221.104/search?q=cache:http%3A//www.string-emil.de/

If you compare the site to the cahce version you can see that all instances of the trem SEO have been removed by now.

Is there no humour allowed in the brave new Google world?

> www.string-emil.de

NSFW, I might add :)

Interesting hack, by the way, to create a "secondary" acronym to rank better for the main acronym.

> NSFW, I might add :)

If you do not scroll or click, it's safe ;-)

It was showing a man on a pool table posing with his half-nude rear butt faced towards the camera... some boss 10 meters apart could mistake this for NSFW :)