Brand.com has filed for bankruptcy

Here is the gist:

"Essentially overnight all of the tools that we utilized didn’t work.

Google even went so far as to remove both Brand.com and Reputation.com from its search engine….

What I learned quickly was that you should never build a business model that is dependent on another platform, especially an SEO play on Google’s platform. e.g. Brand.com’s success was dependent on Google’s algorithm.

Business was great until Google’s engineers decided that they would change their algorithm [to] adversely [affect] many of the tools we used at the time to run ORM campaigns."