SEO Web Marketing

History of in brief by an infographic image -

The J.C. Penny SEO Scandal
During the spring of 2011, the New York Times published an article on the SEO work of J.C. Penny. J.C. Penny’s search results seemed almost too good to be true. The writers consulted an SEO management firm, which lead to a quiet investigation on J.C. Penny’s marketing work. They uncovered a huge link-building scheme. Basically, instead of actually creating such compelling content that people would want to link to their website, J.C. Penny’s SEO team created hundreds of other “unrelated” sites and used them to link back to the J.C. Penny product pages. Google caught wind of the scheme. Because this was “black hat” SEO – a scheme that fraudulently built up the importance of the product ads, Google severely penalized the website.

J.C. Penny disappeared from the listings on the Internet. SearchDex, the SEO firm they were using, was immediately fired.

By hiring a firm that was willing to engage in questionable techniques, J.C. Penny didn’t save money. Instead, they ended up losing a lot of money, good will, and opportunity.

A lot of their marketing was situated in Internet platforms, which meant a loss in potential revenue. It’s estimated that they lost about 350,000 customers per day.

They had to spend money to get every bad link manually removed. Until each bad link was removed, Google would not lift its penalty.

The J.C. Penny site was devalued by Google’s algorithm. That means that the influence they had on the Internet was severely reduced.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html

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