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. [Read more…] about Google Gamed by J.C. Penney?
