SEOinc seems to have vanished from the Top30 search engine results at Google. Until earlier today, SEOinc had consistently ranked in second place under the keyword phrases, “search engine optimization“, “search engine placement“, and “search engine positioning“.

SEOinc had recently been embroiled in a link-trading controversy that started when a third party link-vendor sent several competing SEO/SEM firms a spam-email asking them to provide a link to SEOinc on their sites in exchange for a link to their sites from another, unnamed website. Aside from being a particularly un-tempting offer, many in the SEO community saw it as proof of what are perceived to be blatant link-spamming techniques designed to game Google’s rankings. SEOinc currently has 24,900 backlinks recognized by Google. By comparison, SubmitExpress, the number one listing under “search engine optimization” only has 4,580 backlinks recognized by Google. StepForth, a consistent fifth or sixth under “search engine placement”, has only 812 backlinks seen by Google.

This may be one of those temporary glitches seen from time to time. Over the weekend, we will be watching Google to see if SEOinc returns to the SERPS and if there are any cascading issues consumers should know about.