The New York Times has quite an article about white hat and black hat SEO – entitled “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search.”
It seems that all through the holiday season, Penney’s website was at the top for all kinds of retail searches, including single keywords like “dresses”. Given the amount of competition for all these keywords. something smelled funny to the Times. So they brought in an SEO consultant firm, and they found a large number of backlinks, strewn around thousands of nearly abandoned websites. It sounds like many of these were on abandoned sites – and possibly were parasite hosted, though that is not clear from the article.
Last week, The Times sent Google the evidence it had collected about the links to JCPenney.com. Google promptly set up an interview with Matt Cutts… “I can confirm that this violates our guidelines,” said Mr. Cutts during an hourlong interview on Wednesday, after looking at a list of paid links to JCPenney.com…
On Wednesday evening, Google began what it calls a “manual action” against Penney, essentially demotions specifically aimed at the company. At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was still the No. 1 result for “Samsonite carry on luggage.” Two hours later, it was at No. 71.
Source: NYTime
A Penney’s spokesperson denied that they had authorized those links – and they fired their search consulting firm.
