Google is penalizing Overstock.com in its search results, dropping the retailer’s rankings from first position down to fifth or sixth page of results for many common search terms due to their SEO Linking Scheme.
Overstock.com is now the latest target of Google’s penalization for doing artificial boosting of their search engine rankings. This issue has placed the retailer in the hot seat and became a big buzz in the SEO Community.
Earlier this year, Overstock was ranking near the top of results for many competitive keywords such as “vacuum cleaners” and “laptop computers”. However, after Webmaster World started to question why they were having such great rankings for several common search terms, a review for their linking practices pushed through.
According to Wall Street Journal, Overstock’s way of increasing their search engine rankings is through “encouraging websites of colleges and universities to post links to Overstock pages, giving students and faculty some discounts on the shopping site. Overstock said that they stopped the program on February 10, before receiving notice from Google, but said some university webmasters have been slow to remove the links.“
These Overstock’s tactics have resulted to dropping of their rankings to the fifth and sixth pages of Google search results for many of common search terms, much like JC Penny suffered after outed by a New York Times article published just two weeks ago.
The Wall Street Journal’s story noted that Google implemented the action against Overstock.com after a competitor complained. Will this be the start of online businesses to begin outing their competitors? What do you think?
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