Earlier this month, JC Penney was at the center of a minor Google-y scandal after employing an SEO firm that engaged in some underhanded tactics to boost the department store’s pages to the top of Google’s search results for a great many shopping-related search terms.

The controversy mainly stemmed from a series of questionable links to the site’s content on flimsier pages throughout the internet. The links served to create the appearance of more buzz or reference to JC Penney’s wares where they didn’t really exist, artificially pushing the site to the top of Google’s rankings. JC Penney axed the firm, SearchDex, but the company was manually demoted by Google staff, plummeting from the #1 spot they held for many commonly search-for items. Now Overstock.com has suffered public pillorying at the hands of Google, although the questionable tactics in this case seem less egregious than those of which JC Penney’s site was said to have employed.

Another violation of Google’s PageRank system, however, is suspected. Overstock also ranked unusually high for many items, and it seems their high level of trust was down to the number of links back to product pages originating from .edu addresses. Overstock says that’s due to a 10% discount for some college students and professors, but Google wasn’t really buying that, according to the Wall Street Journal:

In Overstock’s case, the retailer offered discounts of 10% on some merchandise to students and faculty. In exchange, it asked college and university websites to embed links for certain keywords like “bunk beds” or “gift baskets” to Overstock product pages… Google’s guidelines ask websites not to participate in “schemes” that are “intended to manipulate PageRank,” and it forbids sites from paying other sites to embed certain links on their pages. Many schemes intended to trick Google’s search algorithm have included .edu links, search-engine experts say.

“There is big money in .edu links because they are ‘trusted sites’ in Google’s eyes,” said David Harry, president of Reliable SEO, a SEO specialist based in Canada.

Overstock says the program was discontinued on February 10th, a change inexplicably made before Google contacted them regarding the practice. The WSJ notes, however, that education sites are often slow to update content and remove links.

Google snares Overstock in SEO crackdown is a post from: The Inquisitr

When you think of dresses, rugs, Samsonite luggage, skinny jeans or sweater dresses, does mall and former catalog retailer J.C. Penney spring to mind?

Although the national chain was never unknown or struggling for visibility, the store’s e-commerce site (JCP.com) performed ever better than one might expect as far as ranking for popular shopping search terms- so well, in fact, that it caught the eye of an investigative reporter for the New York Times. And what ensued lead Penney to fire its search optimization firm SearchDex, and saw the site “demoted” by the search engine giant to several degrees across many topics after some less than above board ranking tactics were exposed in the piece. (An expert on search engine rankings consulted for the article called Penney’s campaign the “most ambitious attempt” at manipulating Google’s results he’d ever seen.)

Among tactics described in the lengthy exposé is the practice of burying links on low-profile sites around the internet, tricking Google into seeing a relevant reference where none exists and building false trust, the NYT explained:

Some of the 2,015 pages are on [random other] sites related, at least nominally, to clothing. But most are not. The phrase “black dresses” and a Penney link were tacked to the bottom of a site called nuclear.engineeringaddict.com. “Evening dresses” appeared on a site called casino-focus.com. “Cocktail dresses” showed up on bulgariapropertyportal.com. ”Casual dresses” was on a site called elistofbanks.com. “Semi-formal dresses” was pasted, rather incongruously, on usclettermen.org… There are links to JCPenney.com’s dresses page on sites about diseases, cameras, cars, dogs, aluminum sheets, travel, snoring, diamond drills, bathroom tiles, hotel furniture, online games, commodities, fishing, Adobe Flash, glass shower doors, jokes and dentists — and the list goes on.

Matt Cutts, who leads up the Google team that roots out and vociferously publicly frowns upon this sort of thing, confirmed to the Times that Penney had violated clear guidelines decreed by Google on manipulating rankings in such a way. It was Cutts that indicated the company would take “strong corrective action” against Penney.

Darcie Brossart, vice-president of corporate communications at JC Penney, commented on the debacle after Penney was pushed back “manually” (giggidy!) in Google’s results for many search terms. Brossart said:

“The characterization of JC Penney in the New York Times article is misleading and unwarranted… JC Penney 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.”

With the recent news about Google’s crackdown on content farms and this public evisceration of a very well-known retailer, do you think the search engine giant stands a chance cleaning up its results to produce more relevant query answers? Does finding out a company uses such tactics impact your view of the company as a whole? Do you, like Forbes, think the CEO of JC Penney needs to apologize for the actions undertaken on the company’s behalf, even if they didn’t know the strategy was iffy?

Google demotes JC Penney in results after NYT exposé of SEO shenanigans is a post from: The Inquisitr

For those of you unfamiliar with what a robot.txt file is the Twitter version is this: a file on a webserver that tell search engine spiders what they are allowed to index on that server. Pretty simple eh and for the most part really boring as it is filled with lines upon lines of archaic web lingo no one really cares about.

But it is also a place where you can on occasion find some humor as when Gizmodo reported about finding references about zombies in Google’s robot.txt file. There have been others but I don’t think that we have seen the file being used as a way to advertise for a job opening.

It turns out though that the Daily Mail is looking to hire a new SEO (search engine optimization) manager and most appropriately placed the ad in their website’s robot.txt file.

via Malcolm Coles

Yet another hilarious use of the robots.txt file – A SEO job offer is a post from: The Inquisitr

Image via Wikipedia

There is a small bonfire burning at the moment in blog and SEO circles around “syndicated content.” Syndicated content is the syndication of existing content on your blog or site. The debate mostly centers around duplicate content and search engines, with two negative points: using duplicate content may have a negative effect on your search rankings or alternatively have no positive benefit for your site with those search engines. Darren Rowse even went so far as to say “The long and short of it is that as a blogger you’re doing yourself and your readers a disservice by using ‘free articles’.”

I sympathize with the SEO debate, as ultimately you don’t want to damage your Google position, but the emphasis is wrong: think of your users first, not SEO.

Yes, that sounds like Jason Calacanis and ultimately his regular arguments in this case are right. If you are looking at syndicating content (be if free articles, news, whatever) will it be valuable for your readers or not?

Syndication and article duplication is not hurting the thousands of news site that syndicate news from companies such as AP, Reuters or even AAP. Check for duplicate content on any major news story and you’ll see hundreds, even thousands of legitimate mainstream media sites running the exact same stories. Why? because they believe running those stories benefits their readers in creating a more appealing news package as a whole.

Have said this, syndicating external content only doesn’t make for a great business plan. Original content is still the key. Only syndicate content where you believe that the content is complimentary to your existing, original content.

And for the record, I’ve looked at syndicating content here at The Inquisitr, and I won’t rule out syndicating content in the future, but only where it adds to the site.

Syndicated Content: Think Users, Not SEO is a post from: The Inquisitr