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JCPenney Slammed for Black Hat SEO Tricks

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JC Penney penalized by GoogleLast month, the New York Times published an article about a search engine optimization investigation of  JCPenney. Puzzled by how well jcpenney.com did in organic search results for just about everything they sold, they asked an SEO expert to look into it a bit more. The investigation found that thousands of unrelated web sites (many that seemed to contain only links) were linking to the J.C. Penney web site. And most of those links had really descriptive anchor text (the clickable text of the links). It seemed that someone had arranged for all of those links in order to get better rankings in Google.

The New York Times logoThe Times presented their findings to Google. Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed that the tactics violated the Google webmaster guidelines and soon the JCPenney web site was nowhere to found for the queries they had previously ranked number one for. Matt tweeted that “Google’s algorithms had started to work; manual action also taken”.

What happened to JC Penney after cheating with SEO tricks?

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JCPenney, when contacted by the Times, claimed they didn’t know anything about the links and promptly fired their SEO firm, SearchDex.

[Update: SearchDex subsequently either went out of business or changed their name.]

So where did JCPenney go wrong? Why did they do it? What have they lost? And how do they get it back? Read on to learn more and make sure this doesn’t happen to you.

 

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Rat Out Your Competitor

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[January 2015 update below]
Jill Whalen, noted Boston SEO guru, was conducting an experiment to see if Google actually cares about how websites cheat to get to the top of their search results. Her guess is that they don’t, or they would have done something about it a long time ago. To test it, she suggested you rat out your competitor and watch what happens.

How to rat out your competitor to Google

You can participate in that experiment. If you have competitors who are beating you out in search engine results through spammy, deceptive, or unethical SEO practices, go to the website for Rat Out Your Competitor. Let them know what your competitor is doing, and they’ll look into it and report it directly to Google.

How to Rat Out Your Competitor to Google for Cheating

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[Thanks to Dean Voss for pointing out in the comments below that RatOutYourCompetitor.com is no longer what it once was. A better way currently is to rat out your competitor’s webspam directly to Google via their Webspam Reporting Tool.]

Rat out your competitor.[Update 2023] I’ve had the occasion to do this a few times in the intervening years and find that it does work, but sometimes only temporarily if the Google addresses the problem and then soon afterward the offender puts the spammy technique back in play.

For example, a competitor of one of our clients was keyword stuffing their company name in their Google Business Profile.  I alerted Google to that behavior and Google corrected it promptly, reverting their name back to their real name without the added keywords.  Unfortunately, that competitor soon noticed the change and changed it back.  We’ve gone around on this three or four times; each time Google fixed their company name, the offender put it back within a few weeks.  So this may take a little patience and repeated action before Google makes it permanent.

How about you?

Have you had success with this? Please let us know in the comments.

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Google Pigeon Rank Explained

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Quoting Google: “As a Google user, you’re familiar with the speed and accuracy of a Google search. How exactly does Google manage to find the right results for every query as quickly as it does? The heart of Google’s search technology is PigeonRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University.

Google's humorous take on PigeonRank years before the Pigeon algorithm change was created.Building upon the breakthrough work of B. F. Skinner, Page and Brin reasoned that low cost pigeon clusters (PCs) could be used to compute the relative value of web pages faster than human editors or machine-based algorithms. And while Google has dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of our service on a daily basis, PigeonRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.”

Google goes into some length explaining why this process works so well, including a list of FAQs. It’s well worth understanding this aspect of Google’s technology. [Update: the target of this page no longer exists at Google. This was Google’s 2007 April Fool’s joke.

Please Note: If you got here because you’re looking for information about Google’s Pigeon algorithm update in early 2015, the information you may be looking for is here.

And if you need help with your visibility online just reach out to us.

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Algorithm to reduce Googlebomb impact

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Googlebombs are attempts to influence the Google rankings of a page for humorous or political intent. (See a fuller description on Wikipedia.)

A famous example is when a search for the phrase “miserable failure” brought up the official White House biography of then-President George W. Bush as the first result. That’s because so many people had created links on their web pages that pointed to the President’s biography with link text that said “miserable failure”. Since the technique doesn’t only work on Google, the more generic term for it is a “linkbomb”. David Letterman might call it a “stupid SEO trick”.

Googlebombs

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Now, it seems that Google is trying to spoil the fun for those pranksters. They’ve modified their algorithm to detect and disregard such Goglebombs. You can read a good overview of this, including lots of blog responses on the Google Operating System blog.

[Update: a related issue is website’s with an Exact Match Domain where the domain matches a critical keyword for the website. For example SpringfieldNailSalon.com or MadisonPlumber.com.  Such websites could get higher rankings for those keyword searches than they really deserved just because of their domain name. Google corrected for Exact Domain Names in 2013.]

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Google Says Googling Is Inappropriate

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It's okay to use Google, but not to google things.Concerned over the word “Google” becoming a noun in such common usage that they lose their trademark on it (like “escalator” which used to be a trademark of the Otis Elevator Company), Google is objecting to certain uses of their popular name.

An article in The Washington Post, was apparently taken to task by Google’s lawyers.

Appropriate: He ego-surfs on the Google search engine to see if he’s listed in the results.
Inappropriate: He googles himself.
Appropriate: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party.
Inappropriate: I googled that hottie.

“No googling for you!”

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[Update 2013] NBC has an interesting article here: No Googling, says Google — unless you really mean it.

[Update 2021] There’s a fun video about this from 2021: Why Google Doesn’t Want You to Say You “Googled Something”.

What do you think? Do you “google” things? Discuss in the comments below.