JCPennys, Big Corporations and Black Hat SEO
7/03/2011The JCPenny link scheme / black hat / blame the seo firm / manual Google slap has been covered to death (and in case you missed it, here is the original NYT article and Search Engine Lands excellent recap).
A quick recap if you don’t want to read the Gone with the Wind versions. JCPenny was ranking first for every product they sell (kidding, but way too many). They were ranking 1st for generic terms like “area rugs,” “table cloths,” “furniture,” “home decor,” and the best one, “Samsonite carry on luggage” ahead of Samsonite. The NYT asked a search expert to look into it. Ultimate conclusion was there were hundreds of paid links on spam sites with great anchor text pointing to the corresponding pages on JCP.com. NYT reports findings to Google. Google back hands JCP. JCP blames their SEO firm and says they have no knowledge of such activities.
The first thing I thought when I read the article is how links, even those on spam sites that should hold little to no value, still have a tremendous amount of sway in the rankings even though Google is suppose to curb the strength based on quality of the site. Then, I assumed that JCP is a big sites with many natural links and is in good standing with Google so those spam links may not stand out in their overall link graph.
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Sites are always trying to rank higher in search engines. The best way to rank well is to have well written, original content that sites want to link to (this is the non-spamming technique). This is why many web optimizers push you to have a blog on your site. A blog will generate new, original content (hopefully). The problem is, depending on your sites focus, there are only so many articles that you can write that are quality and relevant to your business.
