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?

Filed Under: search engine optimization, seo, spam
Companies: google, jc penney