Happy Valentine's Day dear reader! I love you very much for being here to read this. I hope your day is filled with chocolate and special people! If you shopped for a Valentine's present for someone you love a few weeks back, chances are you were faced with a J.C. Penney's organic search result. If you procrastinated, chances are you found someone else.
Why is this you ask? No, Cupid didn't decide to play favorites for early shoppers and open up the search results to everyone in the last few days. Rather, J.C. Penney used some frowned upon tactics to game the Google-Monster into ranking it's pages higher for a ton of relevant and very difficult search terms.
As first reported by the NY Times, J.C. Penney was ranking in the organic search results (not the sponsored ads) in the 1st position for several highly competitive terms such as:
An actual luggage company or Samsonite themselves would be a much more relative result for a user than the J.C. Penney website. This brings up the question...
When it comes to inbound links for a website, we try to stress quality over quantity for our small business clients. While it is well known that Google does qualify the link source to see if the links are relevant and in the same subject matter, a site can be ranked higher if the volume of inbound links (even from completely unrelated sites) is high enough.
This is precisely how J.C. Penney gamed the system. Through their now fired SEO firm, SearchDex, they created hundreds (maybe thousands?) of phony websites and garnered an enormous number of inbound links to their site. Some examples:
Hopefully, in examining the list of keywords and websites above, you see that the keywords/phrases have zero relevance to the website they appear on. These links provide little, if any value to your SEO. Again, unless you have 100s or 1,000s of sites linking to you with those keywords, like J.C. Penney did.
While J.C. Penney is placing sole blame on their former SEO consultant, and claiming never to have authorized these sites and the links, it is quite a far-fetched story. We'll see how things play out in the coming weeks, but honestly, it's a pretty tuff sell to convince anyone that no one at J.C. Penney knew of this linking strategy. At the end of the day, J.C. Penney paid for these links and sites to be created by paying their consultant.
All of the amazing offers you get from SEO firms need to be reviewed and approved. Ultimately, taking shortcuts or trying to take advantage of what seems like silver bullet solutions to ranking well in Google will ultimately get you banned or buried in the engine. You may succeed for a short period of time, but sooner or later Google's Web Spam Team will catch you and the negative impact will far outweigh any temporary successes you had.
Web marketing firms like protocol 80, play by the rules and help our clients achieve lasting, and effective SEO results. After all, SEO is still one of the highest ROI investments a site owner can make. Good SEO is not an overnight process (unfortunately). It takes a lot of hard work and discipline. We pride ourselves on providing these services with integrity.
