NYT article on JC Penny's black hat campaign

[scanlin]

Saw this article on JC Penny receiving a 'manual adjustment' to drop their rankings by 50+ spots:

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

Curious what you guys think they did wrong, and whether or not you are aware of their SEO firm SearchDex? I mean, was it a simple case of low-quality spam links or was there more to it? Anyone study them in OpenSiteExplorer?

[goodnewscowboy]

Hey Mike: From what I read, it was a simple case of buying links and when the NYTbrought it to Matt & Co's attention, they manually delisted them.

Vanessa Fox had a great write up on it at  Search Engine Land.

[ThomasHgenhaven]

I guess the NYTimes article gives Googl a pretty good reason for the -50 filter:

"Someone paid to have thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the Web, all of which lead directly to JCPenney.com."

Seems like they did the majority of their link building over a year ago - http://www.majesticseo.com/reports/compare-domain-backlink-history?d0=JCPenney.com&type=0

And btw, congrats SEOmoz for getting OSE mentioned in the NYtimes article

[tomcraig86]

I've read a lot about this over the web, but essentially Thomas below has summed it up. It's good to have these high profile cases in the SEO world as it reminds us all why we link build manually ad by the book!!

[Gyi]

I figured that when this hit the mainstream, our clients would want to be sure we weren't doing anything below board. Interestingly, in many instances, it had the opposite result. They wanted to know how JC Penny was having so much success...

[EGOL]

Today (April 27) I see them down at #51 for "dresses".  It will be interesting to see how long Google keeps them in the tank.  They made a lot of money during the Christmas season that other rule-abiding retailers would like to have earned.

I think that they should be in the tank at least until the end of the 2011 Christmas season.

If I bought 100,000 links I bet my site would be out of the SERPs.

[Harbor_Compliance]

Just seeing this post now.  Does anyone find it ironic that NYT drops a follow link to JCPenny in the article?