Fight for the top positions in the Google’s organic search results can turn nasty for the companies which use unethical black-hat SEO techniques .
In the cut throat retail environment it’s no surprise that some companies are tempted to abuse the system. Securing a position at the top of the first page of Google’s SERPs for any specific business or product related term may mean huge spike in revenue from online sales for the business.
Google takes its search rankings very seriously and when companies violate or abuse the rules, it isn’t long before they suffer the consequences.
In a recent search engine showdown, Google buried several J.C. Penney links in its search rankings after discovering that the company was accused of employing unethical link buying techniques to push their pages higher in SERPs.
According to the investigation performed by the New York Times, J.C. Penny allegedly paid to have thousands of links added to hundreds of websites across the Web in order to dominate rankings for search terms like “black dress,” “bedding,” “area rugs” and other consumer searches.
Paid links to J.C. Penney pages boosted the retailer’s presence on the Internet because Google’s algorithms consider a site more search-worthy if it’s “voted” more popular online by the amount of links pointing to it. But paying for links is a definitive Google no-go zone.
Google has confirmed that the tactics employed by J.CC Penny clearly violate their guidelines and that “corrective action” has been undertaken.
J.C. Penney commented that they were unaware of the unethical paid links pointing to their website and currently works on taking irrelevant links down.