Tuesday, 15 February 2011 10:43
Patrick Stafford

American department store giant JCPenney severed ties with its SEO company after the firm engaged in a “black hat” SEO strategy that involved paying hundreds of sites to link back to JCPenney.com, according to a new report.

Local SEO experts say the incident should force Australian SMEs to check that their SEO managers are not engaging in black hat techniques banned by Google which could see them stripped of page one search rankings.

Chris Thomas, chief executive of SEO firm Reseo, says the incident serves as an explicit warning for businesses that they should not engage in such behaviour.

“You really do need to be asking your SEO managers these questions,” Thomas says. “Stay on top of your SEO agency and insist they abide by these guidelines.”

As reported by The New York Times, the practice of creating paid links placed JCPenney at the top of search pages for several categories such as dresses and shoes.

But the pages that were linking back to JCPenney had nothing to do with these topics at all. Some included a site called “nuclear.engineeringaddict.com”, and another was “bulgariapropertyportal.com”.

The problem is that those links were not created organically. JCPenney’s outsourced firm paid other sites to put those links up, thereby artificially inflating JCPenney’s search engine rankings. 

Google prefers its links to be organic in order to provide the more “relevant” result – JCPenney was only relevant because it paid to be.

JCPenney found out what was happening and subsequently fired the firm, SearchDex. But with Google’s policy being so strict it suffered serious consequences.

Software engineer Matt Cutts told the New York Times that what JCPenney was doing “violated our guidelines”.

Soon after, Google started penalising JCPenney’s website using an internal system of points. The publication reports that while the department store ranked first for the phrase “Samsonite carry-on luggage”, within hours it was tucked away on the fourth or fifth page of results.

As of this morning JCPenney was not on the front page of Google for that particular phrase.

The entire incident highlights how powerful banned techniques known as “black hat” can be and the severity of the consequences if a business is caught engaging in such practices.

Jim Stewart, chief executive of Stewart Media, says businesses need to be explicitly clear about what they expect from their SEO firms and says business owners need to become savvy enough with this type of business so they can identify if banned tactics are being used.

“There are a raft of questions you need to ask your SEO firm. Do you have backlinks? Do you need more? And how do you get them? And the most important is are we doing what could be considered black hat?” he says.

Black hat is the term used to identify SEO practices that are banned by Google. The practice is rampant among sites practically begging to get to the top of search rankings.

Last year, SmartCompany investigated the black hat scene in Australia and found that local businesses are engaging in such tactics.

But Stewart says the only reason a business would engage in trading links is because their site isn’t relevant in the first place.

“A lot of businesses don’t need them. I look at the JCPenney site and the problem they have is they are so image heavy there isn’t a lot of room to move there. My advice is that they need more text there to make it more relevant for the Google bots,” he says.

“Whenever a site has heaps of images, the bots get confused and don’t know how to rank it. It means you go down to the bottom of every category.”

Stewart says Australian businesses need to make sites relevant to search engines – and they shouldn’t just rely on paid links to get them to the top.

“If you’re using an SEO company make sure they aren’t using comment spam, backlinks or any other type of black hat. You will be found out,” Stewart says.

“Be relevant to the search. Catalogue your site properly and structure it so that you get to the top.”

Thomas says it is ‘amazing’ the incident ever occurred and says it is encouraging that Google is willing to take action against sites that take part in such behaviour.

“Google has been very clear about this and I think they’re trying to set an example here. Hopefully they will scare people off for a bit,” he says.

“You really need to stay on top of your SEO, Google has shown they will act.”

Source ~ Smartcompany

It’s not about the latest traffic getting fad of the month. It’s about giving the reader quality unique content and in return Google will reward people that provide a good user experience with higher search rankings … Elimentary Watson!

Google targets spam-laden websites
January 22, 2011 – 6:50AM

Google on Friday said it has made it harder for spam-packed websites to rank high in results at the world’s top Internet search engine.

While the amount of “webspam” in query results is less than half of what it was five years ago, the California-based Internet firm has seen a “slight uptick” in recent months, according to Google principal engineer Matt Cutts.

“Webspam is junk you see in search results when websites try to cheat their way into higher positions in search results or otherwise violate search engine quality guidelines,” Cutts explained in a blog post.

“We recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly.”

The new classifier better detects words or phrases typical of “junky, automated, self-promoting” comments repeated on pages at spam websites, according to the engineer.

Google also “radically improved” its ability to detect when legitimate websites have been tainted by hackers in the kinds of attacks that were a major source of spam last year, according to Cutts.

Other spam-fighting tactics being considered at Google include identifying websites laden with content copied from elsewhere on the Internet, he added.

Cutts stressed that having Google-powered ads on pages did not elevate them in search results or bar websites from repercussions of violating quality guidelines.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

Ewan Watt, the managing director of Melbourne search engine optimisation company ROI, said the revamp constituted the biggest change to Google’s algorithms in at least five years.

Watt warned that companies must revisit their Google strategies as most rankings would suddenly have changed. ”Small guys have been snuffed out,” he said.

Advertisement: Story continues below Melbourne search engine consultant Ash Nallawalla said the new search produces a local map on the screen, and a list of several entries with red flags, referring to the map.

”Many local businesses will find Google doesn’t position their entries as high as previously, meaning potential customers will have to scroll further down the pages of results to find them,” Nallawalla said.

Google product manager Jackie Bavaro announced Place Search on Wednesday, describing it as a new kind of local search result that organises information around places, clustering search results around locations that enable users to more easily make comparisons.

”Place Search results will begin appearing automatically on Google when we predict you’re looking for local information. In addition, you’ll find a new link for ‘Places’ in the left-hand panel of the search results page so you can switch to these results whenever you want.”

Nallawalla said that there would be Australian winners. ”More Yellow Pages advertisers will get exposure for a single local search – good news for Sensis, the official Australian supplier of data to Google.”

Nallawalla said the changes reinforced the need for businesses to optimise their online presence, making sure they have a page on their website containing their physical address, phone numbers and other items such as reviews.

A business that previously came up fourth on a list in response to a Google search, might now have 10 map-based entries above it, relegating it to 14th position on the list, pushing it below what search engine experts call ”the fold”, the bottom of the computer screen.

Businesses above the fold are far more likely to gain the attention, and custom, of people conducting a Google search.

Website Mashable.com says Google has been adding an increasing number of location-based search features.

In another development at the Mountain View, California, headquarters of Google, the departure of AdMob Inc. chief Omar Hamoui was announced five months after Google acquired the mobile-advertising business he founded.

Hamoui made the decision for personal reasons, Google said on Friday. Google, which acquired AdMob in May for $US750 million ($A767 million), has used the company to bolster its mobile advertising effort. ”He built a fantastic business in a short period of time, and we wish him all the best,” the company said.

Google is turning to mobile services to help curb its reliance on personal-computer web queries.

The company faces rising competition for online advertising dollars from Facebook and Microsoft.

Source ~ Sydney Morning Herald

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