In Brazil, a very similar case took place not one month ago. Decloar.com, a major travel website for Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries,. Google found out that between November 2010 and February 2011 over 700,000 inbound links were "planted" all over the web. As a result of those inbound links, all of Decolar's URLs were erased from the Google index and didn't make it to the SERP (Search Engine´s Results Page) for keyword queries they usually ranked for nicely.

At the same time, not one single page would come up on Google queries, made using the query operator "site:" (which allows anyone to get a list of indexed pages on a given domain -- just type site:domainname.com into Google to see).

A real disaster for a company whose revenue is mainly driven through e-commerce. The company is now using TV commercials, a far more expensive medium. Way more expensive than a righteous White Hat SEO.

To prevent conviction to a long period of digital ostracism, many companies are now hiring independent consultants to check on their current SEO company. For example, a multinational beverage company hired SEO Consultant Flávio Raimundo, from the Brazilian SEO-shop, to analyze how and if their website was in any way compromised by a SEO job provided by another SEO-shop. We cannot disclose further information on the case due to an NDA, but it does bring to question how SEO professionals may see such actions..

So, since the wheel is already in motion here in Brazil, I decided not to stir things up too much here and looked up other SEO professionals in the US to find out how the market reacts to such an investigation and what their personal opinions on the subject are.