How could a company the size of JCPenny not know about Blackhat SEO Marketing practices? I manage my companies SEO and I know if I see a trend or an influx (spike) in organic traffic, I need to know why and what is causing this trend.
How can JCPenny have an incoming link from http://nuclear.engineeringaddict.com/ for black dresses? How is this site relevant to black dresses? It looks more like Blackhat SEO and not black dresses.
My close friend came up with two scenarios which make a lot of sense.
1 – They are making that statement because they truly did not know what they were getting into when they outsourced their SEO – they end up kind of deserving the bad press that they are getting for not keeping their SEO in-house (and cheat-free) in the first place.
2 – They knew EXACTLY what they were getting into, which, in turn, is exactly why they outsourced it – it’s very easy to say they’ve fired their SEO company now and this way nobody in-house is held responsible since nobody in-house “had any idea” (at least officially).
In my opinion and if I was a betting man, which I am, I would say scenario #2 sounds like the right one. It’s common for big box companies to outsource some of their marketing spend and I think they’ve selected a company that practices Blackhat SEO. The company they outsourced to probably bought and traded links to JCPenney.com on other non-related websites to trick Google into thinking that people were naturally linking to JCPenney.com. This is why JCPenney.com ranked in the number one position for so many search queries.
The other concern I have is how did Google miss this one or did they know all along that JCPenny was showing up in so many different search queries?
Time will tell…
Wow, I am going to put this out there and say some Seo have too much time on their hands and even the boy on the computer in his moms’ basement experiment.Tends to explore the un-known.See how much they can discover and of course in the wrong hands it can be dangerous. They might think it is fun or just wants to find out if it actually works.
Even on a small blog, incoming links disappear and even non recognizable widgets and plug-ins are being caught by wordpress, yet they are in the updates.
That’s a whole other story but this in my opinion this is Black Hat. I have read some very scary things on forums and it is unbelievable what a simple couple of lines of coding will do.
Very interesting article.
I agree with the second theory Frank! I found that with some of the competition in the exhibit industry too, but they were never found out.
Susie,
It is amazing that the marketing department didn’t know this or at least they said they had no idea. I think they need to hire some reputable SEO marketers who know the rules of the road when it comes to best practices.
That’s a whole other story but this in my opinion is Black Hat. I have read some very scary things on forums and it is unbelievable what a simple couple of lines of coding will do.
Very interesting article.
Actually, it has nothing to do with coding and everything to do with buying links on non-relevant web sites.
Hi Frank,
This is very interesting incident in online world. Where Google and JCPenny both can be blamed for this incident. How can JCPenny outsource SEO work to a firm which use black Hat techniques for promotion and how google figure this out so late??
Priya,
You can blame that on the marketing team who outsourced their SEO. I for one would only select a reputable company that has an excellent reputation and provides proven results.