The only sustainable solution to lasting market presence online is through the careful development of value added content directed to your target market.
If you had the chance, would you manipulate the search engines to get top placements for everything in your store during the Christmas rush knowing you’d lose all of your rankings 2 months later? Most of us know how to follow Google rules since at this point in time Google is responsible for sending the bulk of consume traffic (be it paid or organic).
JC Penny was caught link buying, and it wasn’t subtle. It seems someone (maybe a competitor) asked the NY Times to do a piece on how JC Penny was literally manipulating the search engines to get a #1 rank for everything ranging from bed supplies to dresses.
What’s disturbing is a) how easy it was to track down the manipulation (just use Yahoo!’s Site Explorer), and b) how long it took Google to figure it out.
In fact, if it wasn’t for the NY Times article JC PEnny would still be reigning supreme, and their web marketing team SearchDex (https://www.searchdex.com/) would still be employed (they were promptly fired by JC Penny after Google did some corrective action.)
On average, less the academy, every commercial website that’s aware of web marketing participates in some form of tactic that’s in the ‘grey area’ of Google’s TOS. Now, granted, Google has always been very clear: DONT buy links. JC Penny not only bought, but they were very brash in their purchases. Everything from spam websites, expired domains, and completley unrelated sitewide links were employed.
Everything that me as a moderator in the world’s largest SEO forum blasts as tactics only found in desperate third world ‘marketing companies’.
JC Penny, after the report, promptly lost all their rankings.
What’s even more shocking is how JC Penny denied ANY knowledge of their links. Yes, they did hire a third party consultant, but goodness, did their web marketing manager really have no idea what was going on. Either a) she did but won’t admit their blatant attempts to manipulate the search engines, b) is so out of touch with web marketing that she didn’t understand what was going on.
There is a c) in this equation that suggests JC Penny knew EXACTLY what they were doing and were banking on getting away with it.
Needless to say where does this latest Google manual ‘corrective’ action against JC Penny leave the rest of us?
Quite simply in no different place than before. The only sustainable solution to lasting market presence online is through the careful development of value added content directed to your target market. THat content is hopefully interesting enough to attract web links.
Google still bases their algo on where you rank on quality of incoming links, so pay attentino to that, just don’t get caught buying links to the poor quality that JC Penny was or you’ll be in a world of hurt and will spend more money recovering than you did getting into the temporary first place to being with.
Some have mused that maybe JC Penny was a victim of Google bowling (a competitor getting all those bad links). it’s worth noting that if JC Penny and their search consultant did not add the links themselves (plausible) then they wouldn’t have fired the firm. But in reality JC penny either knew what they were doing and needed a scapegoat (likely), or they did’nt know what they were doing and the consultant (searchdex) did.
Either way, the links were more than likely purchased for the sake of manipulation (it’s tough to believe a competitor would’ve built just before Xmas to catch all those sales, millions of sales….)