Interested in seeing if any big name companies have participated in black hat SEO, I searched for case studies. One in particular was appearing frequently: J.C. Penney.
Here is the story:
Throughout the 2010 holiday season, J.C. Penney was conspicuously at the top of Google’s organic search rankings for nearly every product imaginable. Their online marketing team had done such a good job that they were even beating other companies in searches for their own brand: A search for “Samsonite carry on luggage” found J.C. Penney at the top, rather than Samsonite’s own site.
As we heard in class, one of the best ways to improve a site’s online prominence is to get other websites to link to it. But J.C. Penney had taken this too far.
It was discovered that 2,015 other websites linked to the portion of J.C. Penney’s website dedicated to dresses. The vast majority of these links came from websites that had nothing else. Further investigation found that the owners of these sites were being paid to host these links.
Following exposure by the New York Times, Google cracked down on the scheme. Within the span of hours, J.C. Penney’s online ranking for some keywords fell from number one to well past the fifth page.
J.C. Penney’s response to the penalty was to let go of its online marketing firm and claim ignorance of their practices. But this all could have been avoided by using white hat SEO practices. I find it fascinating that even such a large company as J.C. Penney would attempt to use these kind of tricks.
2 Responses
This is quite fascinating. It is very true that several companies, even larger more well-known companies, are able and willing to participate in black hat practices to get a leg up on their competitors. It’s interesting that they thought that this method would be effective and it’s good that Google eventually sought that out and discovered what the potential issues might be.
Wow, this was such a fascinating post to read, about a story I knew nothing about. It is interesting because it seems like in this case, the number of other sites linking to you is more important than the quality of those sites. It definitely was an interesting move to completely fire their online marketing firm, instead of trying to right this wrong logistically, but maybe that was a way of having a fresh start.