At the risk of incurring the wrath of News International, I want to talk a bit about something I read on the other side of the New York Times paywall. Last week, they published a fairly lengthy article about search, Google and companies that attempt to game the system. Remarkably for a mainstream publication, it was well informed, sourcing quotations from Matt Cutts and even a mysterious Palo Alto based, self described ‘black hat’ search engine optimisation, uh, dude. If I were able to do so without forcing you into the mire of registration frustration, I’d link you through to the original piece, but as it is, well, you’ll just have to take my word on what it says.
The main focus of the piece is an American high street department store, JC Penny. If you aren’t aware of JC Penny, they’re roughly equivalent to Debenhams or House of Fraser – there’s one or two in every major town, and they sell a range of products, from dresses to cutlery, from backwards baseball hats to wide screen TVs. You get the picture. You would expect a business of this size to have a reasonably prominent web presence – a fair number of page one rankings, even in competitive areas.
Here’s the thing, however; during the vital Christmas shopping months of October to December, JC Penny dominated search returns – scoring number one search return rankings across the board. Clearly, something was up, alarm bells rang in Google’s hollowed out island, and they started looking into things. And, lo and behold, it turns out that someone was buying links and in massive amounts, all pointing to JC Penny. And so, Google decided they should make a move. Quite slowly, as it happens; they’ve only just taken action, in mid February. But take action they have – they wrote to JC Penny, told them what was going on, and then dropped them significantly in the search rankings. JC Penny denied knowing what was going on and promptly fired their search agency.
Additionally, Matt Cutts, who picks the names out of the search hat when you query Google, announced that a change in their algorithm had been made on or around February 9th to try to further combat this sort of nefarious behaviour.
So, where does this leave us? I think we can draw a few conclusions from this morality tale – firstly, that links are important in search rankings; after all, JC Penny was able to attain and sustain remarkable rankings for a decent period of time. On the other hand, Google, like a ticket inspector waiting for some fare dodging kids hiding in the toilet, is going to get you in the end if you try to beat this system.
Now, here’s the thing. On this blog, I try to keep my writing quite general, about the internet, search, business, marketing, whatever. However, I’ve got to say, I find it remarkable that JC Penny claimed to not know what was going on. Either they were negligent, are lying, their agency was lying to them or, just possibly, there just wasn’t the visibility in the campaign to pick this sort of thing up.
One of the great things about working for Vertical Leap is that we’re able to say to all of our clients, look, you can check out everything we do – we don’t pay for links, but rather, encourage websites to build them so they are created in a natural way. And all this goes into the work log, is tracked on our Apollo campaign management system, so you can have complete visibility into what is going on.
