Major American online retailer punished for black hat SEO

In the months leading up to Christmas 2010, J. C. Penney was out-performing all retailer's websites for hundreds of search phrases such as skinny jeans, furniture, tablecloths and hundreds more.  They even ranked higher than manufacturers such as Samsonite for the manufacturer's own products.

The New York Times asked Doug Pierce an SEO expert from Blue Fountain Media to look at the reasons for J. C. Penney's success in the search engine listings.  He found that the company had been using techniques which Google regards as deceptive and had embarked on "the most ambitious attempt to game Google's search results that he had ever seen."

Somebody appears to have bought thousands of links from hundreds of websites all over the internet.  They all point back to the jcpenney.com website and use link text which contains the keywords and phrases that the company would like to rank highly for in search engine searches.

Yahoo's Site Explorer is showing 139,000 links which point to the site.  Here are three examples


The link text "Furniture Sales" on a Chemistry News website.

 

The link text "School Backpack" on a diet and slimming website.

 

The link text "Peronalised Jewellry" on a website about travelling in China

Following the New York Times article, Google has reviewed the  J. C. Penney site and given them a manual penalty in all their search engine listings.  Where they were number 1 for most phrases it is now difficult to find them in the top 100.

J. C. Penney's response was to claim that it was

"in no way involved in the posting of the links discussed in the article. We did not authorize them and we were not aware that they had been posted.  To be clear, we do not tolerate violations of our policies regarding natural search, which reflect Google’s guidelines."

They fired their SEO firm SearchDex.  They also said

"Our natural search program has never included paid web links, like those described in the article.  It is against our policy, and the fact is, we don’t need to them to build our Google rankings.  We have millions of links from our web partnerships and programs that already gave us link popularity.  These included links from our 1.4 million Facebook fans"

They later back-tracked and admitted that they do not actually have 1.4 million links from Facebook pages.  Read this great post on Search Marketing Wisdom for more details about the Penney responses.