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This Sunday’s (February 13, 2011) New York Times ran a front page story in the business section entitled The Dirty Little Secrets of Search. The story discussed how J.C. Penney appeared as the number one result for hundreds of search phrases for its products. In some cases, the J.C. Penney result for a brand name appeared before the brand name company web site – the example given was the phrase “Samsonite carry on luggage.” J.C. Penney’s sales page for Samsonite appeared ahead of Samsonite.com.
J.C. Penney’s organic search results topped Google’s rankings for months, including the critical holiday season. The Times researches determined that J.C. Penney’s rankings were due in part to incoming links from thousands of pages, many of which had nothing to do with consumer retail goods. In other words, somebody created a huge network of bogus sites that existed primarily to generate “link juice” that benefited J.C. Penney.
J.C. Penney denies any wrongdoing and claims that neither they nor their search engine optimization consultant had anything to do with this manipulation of Google. Google search engineer Matt Cutts explains the delay in Google’s response by noting that the search giant has to deal with over 200 million domain names. Mr. Cutts emphatically denies that Google intentionally delayed its response to manipulation of its search results because J.C. Penney spends close to $2.5 million on Google’s paid search.
I think that the J.C. Penney case is instructive for several reasons, whether you believe J.C. Penney, Google, both or neither. First, inbound links, even from sites that are not topically related to your site, carry a lot of weight in the Google algorithm. There is an active marketplace on the Internet to buy and sell incoming links – although Google frowns at link buying as being an artificial manipulation of its search results.
Second, Google sees search results manipulation as a significant problem and they devote a lot of effort to combating so-called “black hat” search engine optimization. Some of these more questionable tactics may work for a while but eventually, Google will catch on and your site will be banned from its index.
Third, it is possible that someone who does not like you, or perhaps even an unscrupulous business competitor could harm your Google rankings by creating a black hat linking campaign for your site.
