JC Penney Feels The Wrath Of Google For Using Spammy Techniques To Get To The Top
from the don't-mess-with-the-goog dept
Over the weekend there was a fascinating NY Times article about how retailing giant JC Penney apparently had a massive black hat search spam campaign going, which put its homepage at the top of a ton of beneficial searches. In digging into it, the NY Times uncovered a lot of questionable behavior, and Google quickly responded by implementing some sort of "corrective behavior" that sank JC Penney listings. This is slightly less severe than the famous time that Google dumped BMW's domain for a period of time after that company was caught spamming. JC Penney, for its part, denies having authorized such a campaign, and apparently fired the search engine optimization company it had been working with.Of course, there's all sorts of vague statements in the article, and it's not clear how Google meted out this punishment. Of course, since it's listed as a "manual action," it's going to get some anti-Google folks up in arms about how Google "manually" can and does adjust search results -- a point of anger that has been brought out before. But it's not clear that's actually what's going on, and even if there is a "manual" punishment functionality for spamming the Google index, isn't that a good thing? Shouldn't we want Google to be punishing companies that make the search results worse?
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Filed Under: search engine optimization, seo, spam
Companies: google, jc penney
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Interesting
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In the infamous words of Spartacus: Blood and Sand...
I hate spammers no matter their form, even in the can.
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Congruaece of Events
Interestingly, a very applicable Dilbert Cartoon today.
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So basically, you're saying it's okay to spam to get ahead. Good job Mike. Wouldn't it be funny of someone googlebombed you and you got blocked?
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In this case, I think the problem is with the interpretation of the word "worse". Mike (and most of the readers here) interpret "worse" to mean "more inaccurate" -- in other words they are worse when someone games the system to rise to the top. You seem to interpret "worse" to mean exclusively "lower in the rankings".
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Um. Reread the sentence you're quoting. I said the exact opposite of what you claim I said.
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Oh, and this is the 3rd time that JC Penny has done this?
Yeah, that puts the fear into companies to not do things.
What is the risk? Either be number 1 or get caught and be found where you should be found? Black hat? The ones advocating white hat SEO are wrong. The quote "If you are not paying black hats, you are losing to rivals" is right.
As for JC Penny's marketing guidelines, yeah, I can tell that they really follow their own rules.
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With the massive rise of social media, we are no longer in a "black hat / white hat" situation. It's all grey now. Is creating a bunch of extra facebook profiles really bad? Having them friend hundreds of people, is that really bad? Having them like JC Penney stores a lot, would that really be bad? How about fake twitter accounts, automated twitter bots, and the like? How about 5000 wordpress free hosted blogs that just happen to all talk about great shopping exeriences and link to Penney's main page?
The thing about social media is that it is so easily faked.
A friend of mine created a fake profile for a classmate that never existed. He graduated 20 years ago. He included some basic in things in the profile, graduating school, likes, things that are pretty normal. That profile regularly gets friend requests from people who "remember him from school" or "like the same things", though mostly classmates. He was invited to the school reunion. I think he has even been tagged in 20 year old photos... but he doesn't exist.
As a single experiment, it is amusing. As a wholesale system for social influence, it has potential to rip social media into little pieces. How long before someone is paying people for "like" traffic? How long before people are paid to post on their twitter, facebook, and my blank accounts?
Grey hat social spam. It might even hurt Google.
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JC Penney on the other hand should know better. I like to go to JC Penney and shop. It is a welcome alternative to Macy's(Crap) Sears(more crap) and the real crap WalMart. I actually really like JC Penney Jeans and still wear them.
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JC Penney on the other hand should know better. I like to go to JC Penney and shop. It is a welcome alternative to Macy's(Crap) Sears(more crap) and the real crap WalMart. I actually really like JC Penney Jeans and still wear them.
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JC Penney on the other hand should know better. I like to go to JC Penney and shop. It is a welcome alternative to Macy's(Crap) Sears(more crap) and the real crap WalMart. I actually really like JC Penney Jeans and still wear them.
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JC Penney on the other hand should know better. I like to go to JC Penney and shop. It is a welcome alternative to Macy's(Crap) Sears(more crap) and the real crap WalMart. I actually really like JC Penney Jeans and still wear them.
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JC Penney on the other hand should know better. I like to go to JC Penney and shop. It is a welcome alternative to Macy's(Crap) Sears(more crap) and the real crap WalMart. I actually really like JC Penney Jeans and still wear them.
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JC Penney on the other hand should know better. I like to go to JC Penney and shop. It is a welcome alternative to Macy's(Crap) Sears(more crap) and the real crap WalMart. I actually really like JC Penney Jeans and still wear them.
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JC Penney on the other hand should know better. I like to go to JC Penney and shop. It is a welcome alternative to Macy's(Crap) Sears(more crap) and the real crap WalMart. I actually really like JC Penney Jeans and still wear them.
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JC Penney on the other hand should know better. I like to go to JC Penney and shop. It is a welcome alternative to Macy's(Crap) Sears(more crap) and the real crap WalMart. I actually really like JC Penney Jeans and still wear them.
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JC Penney on the other hand should know better. I like to go to JC Penney and shop. It is a welcome alternative to Macy's(Crap) Sears(more crap) and the real crap WalMart. I actually really like JC Penney Jeans and still wear them.
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The penalty for abusing a search engine...
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Please edit the article to correct the link. A correct link will go directly to an article on the topic of the spam campaign without any mess, fuss, or detour and independent of the link-clicker's browser, geographical location, or any other factors (save whether their network connection is working properly of course).
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