The Dirty Little Secrets of Search has been one of the big highlights in NY Times over the past weekend. What was it all about? Well, it was about how J.C. Penney, the major realtor who had unbelievable Google ranking for many keywords. It was reported that that the said ranking had brought them tons and tons of e-commerce income for several months. It was also speculated that those rankings were achieved through link spamming.
Of course, the management of the said major realtor claims of having no clue what their outsourced SEO company done. The company fired that outsourced SEO company immediately after speaking with the NY Times. According to a report, the company had been on the number one rankings all those months. Keywords include, “skinny jeans,” “comforter sets,” “home decor,” “furniture,” “dresses,” and the list goes on and on. They cut the short term reward and now facing this publicly humiliated and penalized in Google.
You may read what exactly J.C. Penney’s SEO team did on a technical level in Vaness Fox’s explanation at Search Engine Land. That incident about J.C. Penney’s has been the tons of discussion around in the SEO community.
Tedster, a member of WebmasterWorld had said something worth to read in the forums. It goes like he thought it was interesting that the algorithmic change was described as it took so long be rolled out. A lot had noticed the big changes initially but seemed to bounce around for days. The articles in NY Times seemed to point out same thing. He plans to think some statistical sampling and feedback machine to learn some kind.
He added that ‘backlinks’ had been a common description of algo changes for quite a while now. It even made him wonder if Google’s address content farms would also be in the same area. He noticed also that if a site has been tagged as hosting a low value outbound link, it might roll over to other outbound links they hosted. Are these ‘individual problem links’ spell bigger trouble for the hosting site? Who knows?
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