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JC Penny Blackhat SEO Backfires

Submitted by jose on Mon, 02/14/2011 - 09:33

This New York Times article talks about how JC Penny was essentially beating their contenders like Macys.com, Gap, and JCrew for clothing searches envolving term phrases like "dresses" and competitors Bed Bath Beyond and Amazon on search terms like "bedding".

It's difficult to think that in February of 2011 companies are still using antiquated SEO techniques that were popularized when SEO first started gaining traction years back. Basically JC Penny is alleged to have participated in creating thousands of shadow sites using generic domain names like bulgariapropertyportal.com. For the most part these doorway pages only had links going to the JC Penny site, but no content related to anything else. 

The New York Times went to Matt Cutts of Google with evidence related to the spamming going on and immediately Google went to work sending JC Penny Links to the bottom of the barrel of their results. Search terms like "living room furniture" where they ranked at #1 on Wednesday at 7pm got dropped to #68 in a matter of 2 hours. The lesson here is to keep it white hat, spamming Google with vast networks of worthless spam does no good for your sites online legitimacy and reputation.

- Jose Tavares(Miami Design Firm)

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Submitted by jose on Fri, 02/25/2011 - 22:40

Many times when doing a Google search I'll come across a site laden with ads to the right and ads to the left with maybe one or two sentences related to my query that usually ends up being the search phrase that I threw at the engine. SEO spammers have made it a business to place rotating ads mixed in with news feeds and in many cases Google's own ads to create vile spam websites.

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