NYT article on JC Penny's black hat campaign
-
Saw this article on JC Penny receiving a 'manual adjustment' to drop their rankings by 50+ spots:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html
Curious what you guys think they did wrong, and whether or not you are aware of their SEO firm SearchDex? I mean, was it a simple case of low-quality spam links or was there more to it? Anyone study them in OpenSiteExplorer?
-
Just seeing this post now. Does anyone find it ironic that NYT drops a follow link to JCPenny in the article?
-
Today (April 27) I see them down at #51 for "dresses". It will be interesting to see how long Google keeps them in the tank. They made a lot of money during the Christmas season that other rule-abiding retailers would like to have earned.
I think that they should be in the tank at least until the end of the 2011 Christmas season.
If I bought 100,000 links I bet my site would be out of the SERPs.
-
I figured that when this hit the mainstream, our clients would want to be sure we weren't doing anything below board. Interestingly, in many instances, it had the opposite result. They wanted to know how JC Penny was having so much success...
-
I've read a lot about this over the web, but essentially Thomas below has summed it up. It's good to have these high profile cases in the SEO world as it reminds us all why we link build manually ad by the book!!
-
I guess the NYTimes article gives Googl a pretty good reason for the -50 filter:
"Someone paid to have thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the Web, all of which lead directly to JCPenney.com."
Seems like they did the majority of their link building over a year ago - http://www.majesticseo.com/reports/compare-domain-backlink-history?d0=JCPenney.com&type=0
And btw, congrats SEOmoz for getting OSE mentioned in the NYtimes article
-
Hey Mike: From what I read, it was a simple case of buying links and when the NYTbrought it to Matt & Co's attention, they manually delisted them.
Vanessa Fox had a great write up on it at Search Engine Land.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How good/bad the exit intent pop-ups? What is Google's perspective?
Hi all, We have launched the exit intent pop-ups on our website where a pop-up will appear when the visitor is about to leave the website. This will trigger when the mouse is moved to the top window section; as an attempt by the visitor to close the window. We see a slight ranking drop post this pop-up launch. As the pop-up is appearing just before someone leaves the website; does this making Google to see as if the user left because of the pop-up and penalizing us? What is your thoughts and suggestions on this? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz1 -
Difference between anchor text pointing to an article in our section pages and the title of our article
My concern is described more in details in the following hypothetic scenario(basically this is the same method that CNN site applies to its site): In one page i have a specific anchor text e.g. "A firefighter rescued a young boy" and this one is linked to an article which if you enter you will see that it has a different title than the anchor text/short title that i mentioned above. So the internal titlte of the article is "A firefighte rescued a young boy in Philippines while it was rainy". I want to know whether this is a good SEO practice or not. Regards, Christos
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DPG_Media0 -
Sudden influx of 404's affecting SERP's?
Hi Mozzers, We've recently updated a site of ours that really should be doing much better than it currently is. It's got a good backlink profile (and some spammy links recently removed), has age on it's side and has been SEO'ed a tremendous amount. (think deep-level, schema.org, site-speed and much, much more). Because of this, we assumed thin, spammy content was the issue and removed these pages, creating new, content-rich pages in the meantime. IE: We removed a link-wheel page; <a>https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Asuperted.com%2Fpopular-searches</a>, which as you can see had a **lot **of results (circa 138,000). And added relevant pages for each of our entertainment 'categories'.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ChimplyWebGroup
<a>http://www.superted.com/category.php/bands-musicians</a> - this page has some historical value, so the Mozbar shows some Page Authority here.
<a>http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/wedding-bands</a> - this is an example of a page linking from the above page. These are brand new URLs and are designed to provide relevant content. The old link-wheel pages contained pure links (usually 50+ on every page), no textual content, yet were still driving small amounts of traffic to our site.
The new pages contain quality and relevant content (ie - our list of Wedding Bands, what else would a searcher be looking for??) but some haven't been indexed/ranked yet. So with this in mind I have a few questions: How do we drive traffic to these new pages? We've started to create industry relevant links through our own members to the top-level pages. (http://www.superted.com/category.php/bands-musicians) The link-profile here _should _flow to some degree to the lower-level pages, right? We've got almost 500 'sub-categories', getting quality links to these is just unrealistic in the short term. How long until we should be indexed? We've seen an 800% drop in Organic Search traffic since removing our spammy link-wheel page. This is to be expected to a degree as these were the only real pages driving traffic. However, we saw this drop (and got rid of the pages) almost exactly a month ago, surely we should be re-indexed and re-algo'ed by now?! **Are we still being algor****hythmically penalised? **The old spammy pages are still indexed in Google (138,000 of them!) despite returning 404's for a month. When will these drop out of the rankings? If Google believes they still exist and we were indeed being punished for them, then it makes sense as to why we're still not ranking, but how do we get rid of them? I've tried submitting a manual removal of URL via WMT, but to no avail. Should I 410 the page? Have I been too hasty? I removed the spammy pages in case they were affecting us via a penalty. There would also have been some potential of duplicate content with the old and the new pages.
_popular-searches.php/event-services/videographer _may have clashed with _profiles.php/videographer, _for example.
Should I have kept these pages whilst we waited for the new pages to re-index? Any help would be extremely appreciated, I'm pulling my hair out that after following 'guidelines', we seem to have been punished in some way for it. I assumed we just needed to give Google time to re-index, but a month should surely be enough for a site with historical SEO value such as ours?
If anyone has any clues about what might be happening here, I'd be more than happy to pay for a genuine expert to take a look. If anyone has any potential ideas, I'd love to reward you with a 'good answer'. Many, many thanks in advance. Ryan.0 -
Are CDN's good or bad for SEO? - Edmonton Web
Hello Moz folks, We just launched a new website: www.edmontonweb.ca It is now ranking on page 2 in our city. The website is built on Wordpress and we have made every effort to make it load faster. We have enabled the right caching and we have reduced the file size. Still, some of our local competitors have lower load times and more importantly lower ttfb's. Is a CDN the right answer? I've read articles demonstrating that Clowd Flare decreased a websites rankings. Is there a better CDN to use, or a propper way to implement Clowd Flare? Thank you very much for your help! Anton,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Web3Marketing87
LAUNCH Edmonton0 -
What if White Hat SEO does not get results?
If company A is paying 5k a month and some of that budget is buying links or content that might be in the gray area but is ranking higher than company B that's following the "rules" and paying the same but not showing up at all, what's company B suppose to do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | EmarketedTeam2 -
Will my association's network of sites get penalized for link farming?
Before beginning I found these similar topics here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/multiple-domains-on-same-ip-address-same-niche-but-different-locations http://www.seomoz.org/q/multiple-domains-on-1-ip-address We manage over two dozen dental sites that are individually owned through out the US. All these dentists are in a dental association which we also run and are featured on (http://www.acedentalresource.com/). Part of the dental associations core is sharing information to make them better dentists and to help their patients which in addition to their education, is why they are considered to be some of the best dentists in the world. As such, we build links from what we consider to be valuable content between the sites. Some sites are on different IPs and C-Blocks, some are not. Given the fact that each site is only promoting the dentist at that brick and mortar location but also has "follow" links to other dentists' content in the network we fear that we are in the grey area of link building practices. Questions are: Is there an effective way to utilize the power of the network if quality content is being shared? What risks are we facing given our network? Should each site be on a different IP? Would having some of our sites on different servers make our backlinks more valuable than having all of our sites under the same server? If it is decided that having unique IPs is best practice, would it be obvious that we made the switch? Keep in mind that ALL sites are involved in the association, so naturally they would be linking to each other, and the main resource website mentioned above. Thanks for your input!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DigitalElevator0 -
White Hat/Black Hat: Incentivized SEO Competition?
General Idea: Rules: The winner is the person who ranks highest for "Random Easy to Rank for Key Phrase" Prize: Some cool prize White or Black hat?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LaunchAStartup0 -
Is this proposal white hat or likely to harm me in the long run?
Hi, I'm considering outsourcing some SEO to a company I got a first month trial sweetener deal with. I've not done this before and am a little unsure about what they propose doing, not sure if I'm being a bit paranoid or too controlly. Details of what they propose: Send them 10 keywords we're interested in ranking for. Work they will perform:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | shabbychicoriginals
-Submit site to all major search engines
-Submit 20 social book marks for site
We'll produce 1 article + 19 spun variations of the article submitted to:
-30 directory sites
-10 press release sites and distribution networks Business Submitted to 5 business directories
5 social networks created Work and ranking report highlighting what has been done at the end of the month. Most of the stuff I've done already or can do myself. The elements that make me a bit suspicious are the: - 1 article plus 19 spun variations? 5 social networks created? What does that even mean? I did get this for about £20 for the 1st month with no commitment afterwards so I am tempted to let them try. But should I be a bit wary it might do more harm than good in the long run? Any advice\opinions would be much appreciated.0