Understanding the JC Penney Link Scheme that Landed them in Google’s Crosshairs

It’s inevitable. No matter how big a company is, how carefully they go about doing it, or how sorry they are when they’re caught, black hat SEO techniques never end well. Google is the judge, jury, and executioner of search and they wield a sharp and heavy axe.

JC Penney learned this the hard way this week. Thanks to a NY Times investigation, they were exposed as participating in a link-building scheme that sent them to the top of search rankings for hundreds, possibly thousands of important organic retail search terms. While the Times does a good job of putting the pieces together, understanding what exactly happened, why it worked, and how Google is reacting is important to anyone who uses search.

JC Penney Black Hat SEO

There is a certain level of hatred pointed to professional search engine optimization firms. They receive the scorn of publications, companies, and individuals alike. Sadly, this is based upon the actions of a very small portion of the industry known as “black hats.”

Proper SEO is based upon building quality content that properly depicts pages of a website. This content can then generate inbound links from other sites that feel the information is valuable or that the source is the authority for particular keywords. That’s the elevator description of what real SEO is.

Black hat SEO has many tools, but the most powerful one is the purchased link. Google and other search engines have been extremely clear about their policy regarding buying and selling links. The rules are simple – if you sell links from your site, those links must be given a “nofollow” attribute. This attribute tells the search engines that the link is of a nature that should not be used to count towards a site’s link equity.

The more link equity a site has, the better it can rank for particular keywords. Google, Bing and other search engines look at inbound links in a way that is similar to votes. If Site A links to Site B and that link has an anchor text of “Best Underwater Basket Weaving Techniques,” the search engines look at it as a vote of confidence that Site B is an authority for the term.

Keep in mind that buying or selling links are not against the rules. Buying or selling links without the proper “nofollow” attribute is.

The company that JC Penney used for their search optimization was allegedly buying links from thousands of sites.

There is a market for different levels of link-purchasing. One is through paid reviews, where blogs are asked to write about a particular product or company with an anchored-link to their website or landing page. The more common and “dirtier” method, the one used by JC Penney’s SEO team, purchases footer links. While the individual links themselves are less powerful than contextual links, the footer normally appears on every page of a site, increasing the chances that the link will be indexed (and therefore counted as a “vote”).

The last method, also used by the SEO firm, uses link-placement services to buy bulk-links to a wide range of websites. These services pay websites to place a code on their site. The code generates links automatically to various clients, often shifting and rotating them from site to site to throw the search engines off of the scent.

The SEO firm has since been released from their duties. Google isn’t impressed.

Rankings for important keywords such as “Dresses” and “Furniture” have plummeted. Few would contest the statement that JC Penney was the best optimized, highest-ranking retail store in the world for months. That status drastically ended this week. Terms where they were ranked in the top 3 or even #1 earlier in the week now show JC Penney in the 30s, 50s, even 90s.

What does this mean for JC Penney? In essence, they no longer exist on Google. Their traffic for unbranded searches (anything other than direct searches for JC Penney) went from millions of visitors per month to next to nothing.

The moral of the story: do things the right way. Proper SEO using strong content and natural link-building is the only way to go. The benefits for going black hat were likely huge for JC Penney… for a few months. The consequences (beyond the PR nightmare of being singled-out by the NY Times and other publications) will be felt for years.