Over the weekend, the NYTimes wrote a damning expose regarding JCPenney’s ability to rank on top of Google’s results page, beating millions of other sites, for an absurd amount of search queries, for all types of products, for the last few months (including the holiday season.) Example: a search for Samsonite luggage pulled up JCP’s website before Samsonite.com.
How did they do it?
Through link building. It’s a fundamental SEO practice- basically, the more links to your site, the higher your site ranks on Google. JCP paid hundreds of irrelevant sites for thousands of random links, all which directed the user back to JCP’s website. While some of the pages with these links were in the retail industry, many more pages had nothing to do with any product at JCP- last time I checked, I don’t visit Bulgaria real estate and nuclear engineering websites hoping for a pair of high heeled boots (come to think of it, JCP has a crappy shoe department anyway. I’d try Macy’s first.)
JCP claims they had no idea that their SEO company was practicing “Black Hat” SEO- ie, unethical SEO practices- and they fired their SEO company, SearchDEX, who arranged these spam websites to provide the links. Unfortunately for JCP, Google does not look kindly on these kinds of SEO . This is unsurprising, as it makes Google look pretty dumb. And now JCP’s website has been demoted for most, if not all, the searches they once ranked first. An hour after Google was alerted to JCP’s underhanded high rankings, they dropped from #1 in “living room furniture” to #68.
However, they still rank high for their name, and Google has an incentive to keep them happy, since they spend nearly $2.46 million a month on Google paid ads. Maybe that’s why Google failed to note their devious SEO until it was pointed out to them by a journalist. I wonder what other companies Google hasn’t noticed?
The moral of the story: make sure your SEO practices appropriate industry standards. Or, spend a lot of money at Google.
POSTED: Tuesday, February 15, 2011
