In one of the biggest SEO headlines in recent months, JCPenney was publicly outed as a practicioner of black hat SEO. The company, whose uncanny organic results have been manually downgraded by Google, was allegedly unaware of the sketchy tactics used by SearchDex, a third party SEO vendor acting on their behalf. Before webspam engineer Matt Cutts and the rest of the Google team took action, JCPenney had front page rankings for multitudes of product-specific keywords, like “comforter sets” for months.

How they did it:

SearchDex used a paid links network that compensates website owners for the placement of links on their sites. By optimizing the anchor text (the text that appears in the underlined hyperlink) with a given keyword for a large number of pages, it did not matter that the pages they used had little traffic on their own or were not contextually relevant. In a specific example shown by Search Engine Land, JCPenney’s landing page for “comforter sets” had 700-plus of these junk sites linking to it, which included sites dedicated to Eastern Medicine, car modification and “How to hack Friendster Private Picture” (I was not personally aware Friendster was even still in existence).

If you have any hand in your company’s search marketing efforts, regardless of size, you should learn from this. Yes, the ROI from their dark alley campaign was probably phenomenal. However, was it worth the mess their PR and marketing people have to clean up now? Google has manually demoted their search results to obscurity. For a company that is trying to transition from its “Big Book” catalog to e-commerce, is a few months of SEO glory worth the work it will take to repair the damage from this fallout? Fortunately for JCPenney, sales driven by organic SEO are only a small part of its revenue. But for any legitimate business seeking long-term online marketing success, pure black hat SEO is just not worth it.

Recently, Google Webspam Engineer Matt Cutts took to the company’s official blog to announce a new anti-spam initiative targeting “content farms”–low-quality, often plagiarized websites that are routinely used to help webmasters cheat their way to the top of search results pages.

Since the Caffeine update and other projects have both grown Google’s index and increased the crawling frequency of its spiders, an alarming number of questionable results have brought on loads of negative press criticizing search quality. Cutts claims that “pure webspam” has been reduced significantly enough to focus on a new target: “low-quality websites”.

Cutts goes on to say that Google has rolled out “two major algorithmic changes” focusing on these websites during 2010, and that the company’s webspam team has been strained as of late due to added obligations. However, the company’s stance is that its engine’s results are better than they ever were, and that they will continue to keep it that way.

At Outrank.com, we have always advocated an SEO strategy that is in alignment with industry best practices. As a business owner, you need to make sure your website is as effective as possible without cheating or spamming the search engines. Call us at 877-332-4321 to learn more.