JC Penney Cheats at the Google Ranking Game

After noticing the strong rankings of JC Penney on Google’s search engine, usually the number one spot, through the latest Christmas season, the New York Times decided to hire an expert to help them find out how the retailer managed to accomplish it.

His findings revealed that someone had added a link to JC Penney on over 2,000 web sites, most having nothing to do with the company, many of them actually abandoned. This is a known dirty secret of search engine optimization (SEO) and Google does not allow it, equating it to cheating.

When the New York Times presented their findings to Google the company took immediate action. In the course of a few hours after Google started their review several search terms dropped from the number one spot to pages much later in the listing of results. When asked, JC Penney denied any knowledge of the tactic and immediately fired SearchDex, their search engine consultant.