posted by Brooke Ford
In February, David Segal of the New York Times discovered dishonest practices by J.C. Penney when he realized they had been appearing in the top of search results for ‘home décor’, ‘skinny jeans’ and ‘comforter sets’ for months. What the article revealed was that thousands of keywords were linked from the retailer’s site to unrelated websites. For instance, links to the site’s dress page were found on websites for cameras, online games, hotels and even diseases. The problem was that even though J.C. Penney does carry household, bedding and clothing items, they are not always the most relevant result. Segal writes, “J. C. Penney even beat out the sites of manufacturers in searches for the products of those manufacturers. Type in “Samsonite carry-on luggage,” for instance, and Penney for months was first on the list, ahead of Samsonite.com.”
To keep rankings fair and search results relevant, Google has been cracking down on cases of SEO abuse, and penalizing violators by diminishing their rankings or even removing them from the search index completely. Though the company’s rankings plummeted as punishment, J.C. Penney denies any fault, blaming the incident on the SEO firm they hired and alleging that the firm’s actions were unauthorized.
Also in February, Google claimed that Overstock.com had been falsely inflating their rankings by offering discounts for faculty and students to embed the store’s links onto .edu sites. Since educational sites are trusted more by search-engines, .edu websites hold greater weight in rankings. This kind of manipulation disrupts the algorithmic design of the search engine, causing unrelated results to appear and decreasing the value of the search engine itself. According to the Wall Street Journal , “Google's guidelines ask websites not to participate in schemes that are intended to manipulate PageRank, and it forbids sites from paying other sites to embed certain links on their pages. Many schemes intended to trick Google's search algorithm have included .edu links, search-engine experts say.”
Known as Black Hat SEO, other forms of search-engine abuse include cloaking, link farming, hiding text and linking to doorway pages. When found, the search engine will rid the offending site from its results database. Cloaking displays different content to its audience than it does to the software that runs a search engine, making it difficult for the search engine to serve its purpose. Link farming consists of a group of unrelated websites all linking to each other, attempting to boost search rankings. Unfortunately, this practice turns those websites into a huge web of spam which Google filters out, defeating the original purpose. Hiding text consists of placing random keywords onto a website in the same color as its background. Search engines ‘read’ the content on page, causing it to show up in irrelevant searches. Fortunately, Google can detect this by reading the code. In 2006, Google caught BMW using these empty ‘doorway pages’, which existed only to direct back to their website. As a result, BMW was actually taken out of the search results for its own brand.
Search Engine Optimization, if done right is supposed to aid in attracting more attention organically. This process of getting to the top of the results may take a little longer than its Black Hat counterparts, but there will be no risk of being removed from the search entirely because of violations against Google’s guidelines.
