At SXSW, Matt Cutts discussed many topics in his panel with Danny Sullivan. The most interesting portion was the answer to a question about how large companies were able to muscle out “ma and pa websites” with aggressive optimization techniques. Cutts replied by saying this: “What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over…

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…