Search Engine Marketing Roundup
Whoa, our first post on the SEO blog for 2011, and its all juicy news!
J.C. Penney caught in bad link neighborhood.
Caution to those practicing black hat SEO, your competitors can initiate an SEO investigation and all your black hat strategies such as bad link neighborhoods will all come to light and your site shall be penalized.
New York Times published an article about a search engine optimization (SEO) investigation of J.C. Penney. Perplexed by how well jcpenney.com did in unpaid (organic) search results for practically everything the retailer sold, they asked someone familiar with the world of search engine optimization (SEO) to look into it a bit more. The investigation found that thousands of seemingly unrelated web sites (many that seemed to contain only links) were linking to the J.C. Penney web site. And most of those links had really descriptive anchor text. It was almost like someone had arranged for all of those links in order to get better rankings in Google. (Search Engine Land)
Here’s the link to the NYT article on SEO
I wonder what drives such seemingly legitimate and big name brands to low levels and dark depths of black hat SEO. They have a lot working for them already, they have a huge huge headstart but they might be in a hurry… haste makes waste in SEO.
On another front, the $315 million AOL bought Hufftington Post got huffed by Slate.com on its questionable SEO practices.
“…but some of the tricks that HuffPo uses to gin up search traffic are pretty sketchy. These tricks include: stuffing articles with strings of meaningless keywords (HuffPo does this on every piece), repeating potential search queries at the top of a story, and carefully engineering articles in response to rising search terms. These tactics exploit obvious weaknesses in Google and other search engines. If Google’s mission is to provide search results that you—a human being—find useful, then HuffPo’s keyword-glutted pieces don’t belong, because no human being considers a list of synonyms an interesting way to start an article.”
Hmmm. Here’s the link to the Slate.com Hufftington Post article.
In the case of Hufftington Post, that strategy of keyword stuffing belongs to black hat in our book. Again, another big organization, albeit successful at SEO but they are greedy and have no decorum (they do, but very low and questionable standards).
The moral of the story on this post is be careful with your SEO. What work then will not work forever.