Getting on Google’s Bad Side: J.C. Penney’s Link Building Scam

It’s not often that a major news publication takes an interest in one organization’s SEO tactics, but that’s exactly what happened when The New York Times did a little investigative research into J.C. Penney’s link building strategy and the findings (published this past weekend) showed that the company was implementing some frowned-upon black hat SEO practices to help boost their rankings in Google search results.

The article which is called, “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search” addresses some of the ways in which J.C. Penney and other organizations can manipulate their ranking in results with poor link building practices. Basically what The New York Times discovered is that the company was using a link building scheme through which they left links on over 2,000 websites, most of which were defunct and had little to do with any of J.C. Penney’s products in an attempt to increase their back links and help their page rank.

After their research came back showing this extensive usage of black hat tactics, the publication contacted Matt Cutts, Google’s Webspam team lead who stated that, despite J.C. Penney’s denial of knowledge of the scam, that this was actually the third infraction of this type by the organization and that Google”absolutely [will]” be, “tak[ing] strong correction action.”

According to their research over the last few months the company had been repeatedly ranking first for a surprising range and number of keywords, despite their competition. A search done today for the same search terms doesn’t show J.C. Penny anywhere in sight in some cases dropping from the number one spot to as low as the 60th or 70th result.

What does this teach us? As we’ve said before, black hat SEO may have a high initial pay off, but in the long run it can be extremely detrimental to your company’s SEO strategy and website’s overall performance in search engine results. While white hat link building is a long and sometimes tedious process, in the long run, it will help your company to be more successful online. If you want to learn more about white hat link building strategies, take a look at our recent webinar, “How to Find Link Love.”

Posted by Amberlie Denny at February 14, 2011 8:00 AM

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