New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google

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News Source: http://searchengineland.com
Published: Feb 12, 2011 - 06:26 pm
Story Found By: Michelle 858 Days ago
Category: SEO

From Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land: "Today, the New York Times published an article about a search engine optimization investigation of J.C. Penney. Perplexed by how well jcpenney.com did in unpaid (organic) search results for practically everything the retailer sold, they asked someone familiar with the world of search engine optimization (SEO) to look into it a bit more. The investigation found that thousands of seemingly unrelated web sites (many that seemed to contain only links) were linking to the J.C. Penney web site. And most of those links had really descriptive anchor text. It was almost like someone had arranged for all of those links in order to get better rankings in Google."

3 Comments

Comments

from crimsongirl 856 Days ago #

Votes: 0

How can I get the NY Times to do a story on my competitors?

Actually, let's hope this very big and public embarassment for Google will spur them into doing something about paid links.

from Jill 856 Days ago #

Votes: 1

@Crimsongirl, feel free to submit your spammy competitors (and what's spammy about them) to Rat Out Your Competitor. But please make sure they're really doing spammy stuff. :)

from St0n3y 856 Days ago #

Votes: 0

Somehow I don't buy the part about "Google’s algorithms had started to work." If I had to guess it was probably 99% manual action that kicked in and killed their rankings.

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