February, 2011

Many people in the SEO/SEM community are talking about the recent article in the New York Times titled: "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search".

A quick synopsis of the article is that J.C. Penney hired an SEO company to help it rank as high as possible. The SEO company (unknown to J.C. Penney according to the company) implemented a wide range of black hat techniques including placing possibly tens of thousands of backlinks all across the internet in an attempt to game Google's algorithm. However, after Google finding out that J.C. Penney was ranking so high for so many top keywords, Google has been forced to reprimand J.C. Penney releasing a statement against the company and ensuring that none of the black hat SEO tricks influence the results. Since the discovery, J.C. Penney has dropped precipitously in the rankings for many of its keywords and effectively disappeared for many others. It should also be noted that there is a possible side story (a controversy) that since J.C. Penney is one of Google's largest advertisers, it is, of course, possible that Google may have looked the other way until it couldn't look away any longer.