I ran across an article on the site BoingBoing.com the other night while going through my RSS feeds. Rob Cockerham of Cockeyed.com had written an interesting article on how the site Cash4Gold.com will offer you “One-Third of the Actual Value for your Gold” that you send in.

The article QUICKLY shot up to the #3 spot on Google for the term Cash4Gold. Not long after the SEO team at Cash4Gold.com sent Rob an email asking him to take down the article.

Is there a financial arrangement we can come to that will offset your Adsense income and make it worth your while to take down or at least “de-optimize” it for that phrase?

The Consumerist.com also picked up the article and also posted a story of their own about the perceived fraud of Cash4Gold.com. The Consumerist article actually is the #2 result for the term Cash4Gold.

Cash4Gold.com even spent a signifigant chunk of money on a SuperBowl commerical featuring MC Hammer and Ed McMahon.

Will the two negative posts cause that money to be wasted?

Are we seeing bloggers take the place of the Better Business Bureau?

If a company was a fraud in the past, how would you know until you interacted with them?

There are plenty of other companies that get negative press and have tons of blog posts written concerning their services without having those articles show up in the top 5 results of a high traffic branded search term. Usually you only see negative results show up on branded terms that include scam, fraud, etc.

Are bloggers exposing a company that is taking advantage of desperate people in a tough economy or are they being unfair to a company that is simply giving people a service that is easy to use and is upfront with fees and prices?