JC Penny- Shady Business.
The New York Times
published a story last February regarding a serious SEO no-no and a JC Penny
Scandal.
JC Penny has become a house-hold name and seemed like the go
to place for just about everything from luggage to the “little black dress”. JC Penny quickly became the number one search
for hundreds of items such as, comforter sets, clothing, and home décor.
Investigations soon began of the strange search engine results.
It was found that JC Penny had found a new niche to the online dark-side to
market their company. Leave it to JC Penny to be shady! What JC Penny didn’t know
was that Google sorts their results in accordance with many factors, and one of
those being the number of outside links that filter into any given site. What
does this mean for JC Penny? Well come to find out JC Penny had tagged more
than 2,012 sites with a direct link to their site. The bulk of their tagged
websites were out of use meaning that the sole purpose was purely to boost JC
Penny's search ranking. WAY TO GO JC PENNY!
New York Times reported
that tags were found off topic sites:
New York Times reported that JC Penny had attached the
phrase “black dress” to the bottom of a website titled nuclear.engineeringaddict.com.
What else did they find, you may ask? “Evening dresses” was
on a site called casino-focus.com while “Cocktail dresses” showed up on
bulgariapropertyportal.com. ”Casual dresses” was on a site called
elistofbanks.com and “Semi-formal dresses” was pasted on usclettermen.org. JC Penny seemed to cover all their types of
dresses…… (Good thinking, JC Penny!) The list seems to go on and on as the
links to JCPenney.com’s dresses are on sites about, cameras, dogs, travel,
snoring, online games, jewelry stores,
ADOBE flash, and even dentist. JC Penny was
clearly targeting a wide audience.
The links were quickly taken down, however it did shed light
on how effective their scheme was.
"At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was
still the No. 1 result for “Samsonite carry on luggage.” Two hours later, it was at No. 71." Sorry
about your bad luck JC Penny.
That's so interesting that in a matter of hours, they went from being No. 1 to No. 71.
ReplyDeleteI guess that goes to prove there is a way to do SEO's and there is a way NOT to do SEO's.
Great post.
SAY-WHHHAAAT! No. 1 to No. 17. Oh SHOOT! I'll be takin notes from these crazies! Thanks, Tara!
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