The Email I Received from Google in 2007 When They Wanted to Buy Zilo (2012)
<i>In March 2007, we signed a term sheet with Mangrove who wanted to invest in Zlio..A few days after, I met a Google Executive who decided to buy the company.  For the little story, Zlio, became blacklisted/sandboxed by Google 6 months after…. It killed the company…</i><p><i>When I’ve taken a job at Zlio.com in 2007 to start their US operations, with Jeremie Berrebi as a CEO, I was really excited by the growth I was seeing. All signals were green : users, revenues, traction, VC funding. They had it all.<p>A week after I joined the company, Google sandboxed us, and we’ve lost 90% of our traffic. After months and months of work trying to solve our inbound traffic issue, we pretty much all gave up and decided to move on to other things.</i><p>Is it possible they were doing blackhat SEO, which got them banned from Google?<p>Otherwise, this sounds pretty damning for Google.  I'm just trying to think of alternative theories.  It seems like if Google were willing to act this way, they'd have a history of doing so.  Do they?<p>EDIT: Yes, probably spam:  <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4755386" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4755386</a>