Trump's Campaign Scammy Web Design Firm Penalized by Google for Hiding Links

In another scammerific day for the Trump campaign, this little gem was posed after a WaPo article about this month's campaign spends included a web dev paid $8M+ by the Trump Campaign. Turns out the web designer has been leveraging the Trump Campaigns website to usurp other web designers in the San Antonio area by hiding links in his clients' webpages (big no no for google because they can contain malware and are generally considered spam):

I couldn’t resist doing a little digging on [Trump's Web Design company Parscale]. First, here’s an example – courtesy of Archive.org – of the hidden link on Trump’s site to Parscale’s with the anchor text = “San Antonio Web Design” from May 2015. For you non-SEO reader types, these links should help Parscale rank well for “San Antonio Web Design” & related queries.

Web developers have been pulling this scam since the dawn of SEO, but it’s particularly prevalent on SMB sites who don’t know better. Kind of awesome to see someone try to pull this off on a YUGE domain like Trump’s.

According to our 2016 Local SEO Ranking Factors study, backlinks are critical to local rankings, so it’s not surprising that Parscale is aggressively pursuing these links. But these links are risky, for both Parscale and his clients, as they are obviously intended to game Parscale’s site’s search engine rankings.

In fact it looks like Google may have penalized Parscale’s site sometime in October – there was an unconfirmed update around then – as Parscale’s rankings started to tank.

I am not surprised that Trump’s well-oiled campaign has a SEO scam-artist (or SEO genius – you be the judge) on the payroll. I am also not surprised that Google has not really nailed Parscale yet.