Malphurs

With little fan-fare, the New York Times recently released a story that – in developer’s circles – is equivalent to a full-blown scandal. On Feb. 12, 2001, Times writer David Segal reported that:

The company [J. C. Penney] bested millions of sites — and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs…This striking performance lasted for months, most crucially through the holiday season, when there is a huge spike in online shopping. J. C. Penney even beat out the sites of manufacturers in searches for the products of those manufacturers… Does the collective wisdom of the Web really say that Penney has the most essential site when it comes to dresses? And bedding? And area rugs? And dozens of other words and phrases?”

After hiring an expert in SEO optimization, the New York Times found that J. C. Penney’s optimization techniques were “the most ambitious attempt to game Google’s search results that he has ever seen.”

So, what did J. C. Penney do that was so bad, yet so effective? It all comes down to a practice called “Black Hat Optimization.”

The Black Art of Black Hat

Black Hat optimization techniques are not illegal, but they are certainly considered cheating. And apparently, J. C. Penney had no moral qualms in implementing such strategies.

By exploiting Google’s method of rating sites higher based on how many links lead to it, all evidence points to J. C. Penney having paid an outside consultant to place hundreds of critical keywords across hundreds of sites so that they lead directly to Penney’s site. Want to be the top result when someone searches for “Oven Mittens”? Simply hire a “consultant” to utilize a tool entitled “Open Site Explorer” and he/she will place a link to your site on hundreds – or even thousands – of cooking sites around the web. And, this is exactly how J. C. Penney got to be number one in so many key search results during the biggest online shopping season of the year.

The Times continues:

“Mr. Pierce found 2,015 pages with phrases like “casual dresses,” “evening dresses,” “little black dress” or “cocktail dress.” Click on any of these phrases on any of these 2,015 pages, and you are bounced directly to the main page for dresses on JCPenney.com.”

Making things even more odd:

“Some of the 2,015 pages are on sites related, at least nominally, to clothing. But most are not… 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.”

Actions & Consequences

J. C. Penney is on record having said:

“J. C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links that you sent to us, as it is against our natural search policies… We are working to have the links taken down.”

But, it is certainly hard to imagine that the particular consultant in question cheated the results just because he happened to LOVE the store so much.

On Google’s part, the reaction has been to treat the company with a slap on the wrist. Having already caught J. C. Penney violating search rules on three different occasions, they simply lowered the company’s search ranking on those keywords. Yet, upon doing so, Google never went back to check that they had stopped using these methods.

Regardless, the Times’ story had an affect on Google. A few days after the story ran, Google stopped being soft and “buried” many of the J. C. Penney search results. In February: “The average Penney position for 59 search terms was 1.3 On Feb. 8… it was 4. By Feb. 10, it was 52.”

Upon being questioned how Google let this slip for so long, they stated that “there are 200 million domain names and a mere 24,000 employees at Google.”

And that is how the J. C. Penney slipped through the almighty “Google grasp”. Or is it?

Lingering Questions

The question still remains. How can one small site get caught and punished severely by Google, but a huge company such as J. C. Penney not? As usual, the proof can be found by looking at who stands to gain the most in such a situation… Enter “Advertising Age” stage left… Last year, the magazine ran a report showing J. C. Penney as among Google’s largest advertisers, spending a whopping $2.46 million a MONTH on paid search ads. Add to this the EU’s allegations of anti-trust abuses and Google has some ‘splaining to do.

Whether or not J. C. Penney’s dollars are a coincidence or not, this story serves to remind all of the one thing that we can always be certain of: Cash is King. And in this case, so were the cheaters.