11 Jul 2011

SEO Lessons from JCPenney

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Moshe Zchut & Eugene Aronsky| 1 Comment
Many of us in the SEO industry have been in shock this week as we’ve learned that JCPenney (a venerable US department store that has been around for about 100 years) has been punished by Google for employing Black Hat SEO tactics. (For those of you that haven’t heard about this story here is a brief abstract, in the last few months the website of JCPenney has been showing up #1 in Google for 100’s of searches, ranging from “dresses” to “baby furniture”, following a reader complaint the NY Times investigated this and discovered that JCPenney achieved these results by deploying Black Hat SEO techniques [they had purchased 1000’s of backlinks from a ton of different sites including porn sites and other sites completely unrelated to any products that they sell]. The NY Times then proceeded to report its findings to Google, who having discovered that JCPenney was in blatant violation of their linking policy punished the JCPenney site).
Ever since the JCPenney story broke the SEO community has been falling over itself, many saying “I told you so” and others saying “if it works, why not use it…” so I would like to take a few minutes to go over some of the lessons that we might learn from JCPenney.

1. Do not try to cheat Google!

– If you are an SEO and you know that the techniques you are using are Black Hat, do not use them b/c you will get caught! If you are hiring an SEO company, ask them what techniques they use to get results, and if they say they “buy links” run! Additionally if you are in the market for SEO, and you run across some company promising you the top rankings for all your keywords, remember the old adage “If it is too good to be true…”

2. Do not buy links

– Buying links is not a good long term SEO strategy, it may get you OK short term results but it will not get you results in the long term, and what’s worse, it may get you punished or even banned from Google.

3. Do not participate in link trading schemes

– There are a number of link trading schemes around that promise great results (link wheel, or Angela’s links just to name a few) these are not credible SEO strategies and will not work in the long term

4. Link trading is OK

– Following this scandal many SEO’s have come out totally against trading links, well I’m here to tell you that trading links is OK (sometimes) but you should trade links with the primary purpose of getting referral traffic rather than to boost your SEO, also, you should be very careful as far as to the sites with whom you trade links. You should only trade links with sites/blogs in your same niche, before trading a link make sure to do your research, look to see when the last time the site was updated and check that site’s backlinks using Open Site Explorer. You should also remember that reciprocal links are largely ignored by Google, so you should only trade links in order to get traffic.

5. Organic links are always better

– If you’ve learned nothing else from this scandal/blog post I’d urge you to remember this, organic links are what you want! As far as the # of links you have no more than about 10% of your backlinks should be a result of link trades, the remaining 90% should be organic links So create great content so that people will want to link to you.
On 2nd glance, I guess that another important take home point is moderation; Google has an algorithm that looks at the frequency at which sites get backlinks, if you have 5 sites linking to you on Monday, and 1000 sites linking to you on Friday (that same week) you are bound to get red flagged and each link will get examined. This is important for everyone to understand b/c even if the 1000 backlinks that you got to your site in a single week were natural your site might still get red flagged by Google.

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