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The Dirty Little Secrets of Search
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The NY Times has an interesting story (reg. may be required) about how JCPenney used link farms to become the number one google search result for such terms as 'dresses,' 'bedding,' and 'samsonite carry on luggage' and what Google did to them when they found out. 'Actually, it's the most ambitious attempt I've ever heard of,' says Doug Pierce, an expert in online search. 'This whole thing just blew me away. Especially for such a major brand. You'd think they would have people around them that would know better.'"
The whole idea of an SEO budget is to push your name out to the top line of google, bing or anything else people use to search.
The intent was to game the system. And by doing so, make a ton of money. There are no laws for internet search ... unless you can use trademark laws to push a competitor who's doing that to your brand name.
Unscrupulous yes, ruthless yes, but that is the true face of capitalism anyway. Google can try regulating, but only enough to make the same people put in pennies into their sidebar offering of less-worth, but clearly marked advertising.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
News at 11.
Reasonably written article.
If you already know the ins and outs of search or have no interest in it's specifics you can spare yourself the read, though. Ymmv.
Karma? What's that again?
I didn't want to RTFA in order to know how badly miffed Google was by all of this, so here's a snippet.
“Am I happy this happened?” he later asked. “Absolutely not. Is Google going to take strong corrective action? We absolutely will.”
And the company did. On Wednesday evening, Google began what it calls a “manual action” against Penney, essentially demotions specifically aimed at the company.
At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was still the No. 1 result for “Samsonite carry on luggage.”
Two hours later, it was at No. 71.
At 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Penney was No. 1 in searches for “living room furniture.”
By 9 p.m., it had sunk to No. 68.
In other words, one moment Penney was the most visible online destination for living room furniture in the country.
The next it was essentially buried.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
This is totally unfair of Google to punish JC Penney like this. We need to help them restore their page rank. I'll start.
Nazi memorabilia
abortion factory
murder weapons
penny stock
worst place to work
token black guy
Surprise surprise. JCP execs claim total ignorance of the whole thing, yet they fired their SEO consulting company the second word of what happened got out. There wasn't even a chance to stop to ask "Hey, what's going on here?" Was what they did illegal? Not in any way. Were they aware that it wasn't exactly ethical? Absolutely, despite what their public declarations are.
Really, anyone who hasn't worked retail for at least some time in their lives doesn't have any understanding of what really happens when you are in that position. I know this item is more about the empowered management and their bone-headed decisions (nowhere is the dilbert principle of management applied as much as in retail), but we should keep in mind the poor retail slaves who end up on the chopping block because of this kind of shit.
In a partial shout-out to my comrades - both past and present - in arms in retail, I will point you to retail hell underground, where those of you who were so privileged as to never have to take a retail position can get a glimpse of what some of us have had to whether.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
To play devil's advocate, who says that JC Penny did this themselves? Maybe their head of IT that was just some lay person that worked himself up through the ranks got one of some SEO spam and thought "Hey, this sounds like a great idea!". Not knowing how they conducted business he just went with it.
Sure enough, JC Penny is #1. He looks like a hero, pays off the small spamming firm and everyone is happy until they're caught.
I'm webmaster for 2-3 smal town rugby websites. I always get "BE #1!" spam. Except I'm already #1. Search for "Rugby " + your nearest decent sized town and you'll only find one website.
The company is "JC Penney", not "Penny".
..nuff said!
The Times did a good job on this, but there are some questions.
They did mention that Penney is (or was) a big Google advertiser, but you've got to wonder who else has succeeded in doing this.
I read a blogger Whither the NY Times who's doing a pretty funny review of the Times day by day, with the looming paywall in the background.
He asks who else, and wonders how did the Times scope this out?
Businesses seem to rise and fall in their Google rankings in weird ways. Maybe the search engine optimizers have figured something out. Or maybe Google just looks the other way once in awhile
It seems these companies, J.C.Penney, BMW, on and on, are as interested in keeping up with Google's "Laws", how to adhere to them, how to avoid them, how to get around them, than they are with actual civil laws of employee treatment, customer safety, and societal taxes.
And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.
Despite the cowboy outlaw connotations, black-hat services are not illegal, but trafficking in them risks the wrath of Google. The company draws a pretty thick line between techniques it considers deceptive and “white hat” approaches, which are offered by hundreds of consulting firms and are legitimate ways to increase a site’s visibility.
I find it interesting that they are using 'black hat' and 'white hat' to distinguish between different actions and motives in search engine optimization, when the same terms cannot seem to catch on in public discussions of hacking, cracking and computer security. Makes me jealous.
I see they are currently #1 on bing for Comforters and #4 for dresses. I wonder if it would be possible for the search engines share data on who is cheating?
I'm actually really surprised by the article, that it took so few sites to affect results and that such obviously off-topic links still helped. I thought the algorithms were already smarter than that.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
I wonder if Google's action could lead to a lawsuit? It's one thing to re-jigger the ranking equation to block linkfarms, but something else entirely to purposely punish a company and make them essentially invisible.
BTW I used to work for Penney's. They were a good company in the 90s, riding high, and matching 90 cents for every dollar their employees put into an IRA.
Then they got hit hard by the rise of Web shopping, were forced in 2002 to layoff all their managers, eliminated 2/3rds of the clerks, promoted some of these non-degreed clerks as new "managers" but at 1/3rd the pay, and just barely hung on. (Same thing happened with Sears, Kohls, and so on.) The store's quality and service has been lousy ever since. I'm not surprised to hear they would "cheat" to rank on top of search engines, as the Corporate Office went from a Golden Rule-led organization to an "anything to survive" mentality.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
Ah yes, our friends at google find themselves in a wonderful position...where multi-billion dollar companies bow to them to get their rankings up. Isn't there something wrong with that? Sure, google was within their right to drop jcp from their ranks for being a tad too clever; but on anther hand, what alternatives to these companies have? IF this was a free service, governed by a non-commercial entity then all is well; but google is no different than Microsoft these days: huge, multi-billion dollar beast who can make or break you.
We need a p2p-based, decentralized search engine that cannot be governed by ONE commercial entity!
I just did a search and JC Penny are right there on the first page in the right hand column. Probably because they are local here but its still funny. Most of the sites I see taking JC Penny's place are sites I never heard of so I guess that shows the statement about what one might expect to see when typing in search terms, is just a made up guess or untested literary license.
www.Migrainesoft.com - Computer giving you a headache? We can fix that!
And who declared Google the "decider" of what should top search listings?
Any algorithm is going to have winners and losers. Why should any business simply accept Google's arbitrary ranking without trying to do what they can to improve that ranking? Google penalty box? Sounds like Google is taking it upon themselves to decide "right and wrong" on the internet and inflict punishment on those who don't comply with their dictates for what constitutes "fair", without anyone having any recourse. Color me not impressed.
What is search engine optimization to a corporation is search result poisoning to users.
Then again, an opportunity arises for a smaller non-SEO-attacked search engine to rise and take Google's place like Google took Altavista's.
This is a great article. I would really recommend other to read it.
It gives great insight into the world of searches and profiles both viewpoints from a SEO company and also Google's anti-SEO team.
It's a bit long, but definitely worth your time.
As the article says, JC Penny is one of Google's biggest paid sponsors so that cushioned the blow, you don't whack your best customers. I just did a google search for "Izod" (men's shirts which are carried by many stores) and J.C. Penny had a yellow-boxed link (presumably paid for) at the top. They're the #2 boxed result for "Lee Jeans".
Google should permaban any company that does this. FOREVER. Google should go one step further even. Explicit searches for a company that does this should instead link to competitors and negative reviews.
First, I noted that in the article, Google claims to try to keep the "money" side separate from the "search" side. Okay, but the fact remains that if you don't crack down on cheating, then companies will have less incentive to buy paid links from Google. The fact that the quality of the results would decrease for the user is secondary. So Google surely is motivated to prevent companies from gaming the system, not out of some altruistic sense of honesty or service to the user, but because cheating threatens their paid advertising model.
The other observation is that SEO tactics could easily be used as a weapon against competitors. If you're a top-listed company and your competitors want to knock you down...all they have to do is put up spam links to your site, then report it to Google. Next thing you know, you've been de-listed.
when the word dresses is put in google J C Penneys is not first it is the 4th listing
whatever you call it, it is an awful chain
I wonder if Google's action could lead to a lawsuit? It's one thing to re-jigger the ranking equation to block linkfarms, but something else entirely to purposely punish a company and make them essentially invisible.
It wouldn't be the first time. Look up SearchKing.
The job of a search engine is to find web pages that are interesting to people, and it does that job by using a lot of robots with models about what's interesting. If you've got a web site you want the search engine to tell people is interesting, you can either do that honestly, by making it actually interesting, or dishonestly, by lying to the robots so they'll tell the humans that it's interesting, and sometimes that's cheaper and easier because robots only have models.
To the extent that there are "white hat SEOs", they're either doing the basic web design jobs of making sure that your information is findable (e.g. putting the keywords in text, not in images played by flash animation that other web designers told you would look cool), or else they're doing editorial work by telling you to write more interesting web content. For the most part, those people don't call themselves "SEOs", they call themselves "web designers" or "editors" or "graphic designers", though there are some companies that really do need to hire somebody to clean up bad web design.
Real SEOs are the black-hat types, who'll offer to get results for you by methods other than making your web site actually more interesting. They're lying scum, but sometimes they're good enough at lying to robots that they get results. Unfortunately, one of the big results they get is garbage all over the web, from link spam in blog comments to garbage that search engines find that's really just copying bits of content to attract advertising. Makes the web as a whole a lot less interesting.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I just did a Google search for "samsonite carry on luggage". While the text link for JCPenney's is about five or six pages down, Google starts off with a row of Shopping images, and JCPenney's one of them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Copying a New York Times article wholesale, and then using a Slashdot post to bait-and-switch readers into visiting your website rather than the Times?
Ballsy.
Doing so when the article's content is about using malicious links to artificially inflate your site's visibility?
Just. Not. Cool.
The original NY TImes article is here. Whether you approve of the Times' registration policy or not, you shouldn't support people who steal their content and use it to make money.
David Segal is quite the inane journalist. He equates SEO hucksters with "black-hats". True black-hats are too busy commiting crimes to waste their time on such mundanity.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
This is one of those press events which gives CEOs nightmares.
There's been press criticism of Google before, but it's mostly been anecdotal - blogs, op-eds, and other commentary. This time, there's real reporting, with the New York Times naming names.
Usually, after criticism, Google says nothing, or perhaps replies in a blog posting. Google people rarely speak in forums that they don't control. This time, Matt Cutts had to sit down with New York Times reporters for an hour long interrogation.
Google's vaunted claims that they can detect link spam were shown to be false. Google didn't catch the spam, the New York Times did. Then Google made an algorithm change and claimed that fixed most of the problem. The Times tracked Google's results and showed that it didn't. Only a "manual action" moved J.C. Penny down.
Now the rest of the business press is going to take a hard look at search. Expect follow-up articles in Bloomberg, Fortune, etc. Google management has weeks of pain ahead. After their feud with Microsoft last week, their troubles with European antitrust regulators, and Blekko nipping at their heels, they didn't need this. Attention may be focused on those "manual actions". Should those be published? The European Union has specifically asked for that data, and Google can no longer deny that it exists.
I've been critical of Google's anti-spam efforts, mostly on the Places side.I thought they were better at detecting link farms of junk sites, though. That's old-school SEO. If they missed this, they have worse problems than I'd thought.
I really don't think JCPenney had any idea this was going on. I'm thinking they paid some company to make them float to the top of the search engine results and had no idea how that company would do it. I'm thinking the "SEO" company is the bad guy here and JCPenney just looks like the mastermind.
I can't help but think the only long-term way to reduce the effectiveness of these kinds of SEO tricks is to remove all storefronts from Google results. Even that isn't foolproof certainly, and I'm sure that online shopping sites will then just use non-store entry pages. But these SEO tricks work because many people, when they want to buy something, just go to Google and click on the first link presented, which I don't think anyone knowledgeable about web search will think is a good idea. That behavior has to change, and until Google gets serious about informing users about it, or Google somehow loses its place as the #1 search provider and whoever takes its place does so, SEO will probably continue to be big business, and Google/Whoever will continue having to run around putting out little fires.
Slashdot adds rel="nofollow" to all links
I thought rel="nofollow" applied only to links in posts without the karma bonus. (checks page source code) Yes, that's still the case.
Or it could be that you're looking at the Paid part of the site...
Here is something very interesting I read. A different perspective about the importance being given to incoming links. I have seen no one question the very essence of link building and so called democratic polling : http://www.wdgtech.com.au/blog/?p=407
Just wrote about how sucky googles search is becoming because of these retarded sites... We need a revolution http://webuilders.co.za/
"You'd think they would have people around them that would know better." Of course they do. But, as has been discussed on Slashdot time and again, there's the people that know better and there's the people in power. Unfortunately, they're usually mutually exclusive groups. I can even picture the meeting: a group gathered around a large table. 2 or 3 IT guys say "We shouldn't game the system, big trouble if we get caught." Accounting guy says "If we do it it can bring us big bucks!" High end company officer says "Cash?! Go for it!"
Blackhat seo is everywhere, you can't avoid it. Spammers are faster than manual reviewers.
the right bar is for paid search - pay per click - most times when Google does an update to their algorithm the companies are left scurrying to get back and have to buy clicks - interestingly Google had a habit of making major changes right before major shopping times... not evil at all
I get large color circulars on stiff card stock from Penneys in the mail every other week, each proclaiming 20-40% off sales. Their bulk mail budget must be staggering.
Searching for "black dresses" now relegates J.C. Penny to the sixth page of results, meaning that casual users who are not aware that search results cover more than one page will never see it again. Do not mess with Google.
i love it when google kicks some other company's ass.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Why does google even *carry* "sponsored ads" from Target, who at least 85% of the time will claim a hit on *anything* you're looking for, but if you follow it, they don't have it? I mean, try fabric by the yard. Or chemicals. Or....
mark
What does work is Bing's approach of using actual user data.
No, that's spammable, too. See "click fraud". Anonymous crowdsourcing in competitive environments only works if you're a little player and nobody cares enough to spam you. If Blekko gets enough market share to attract SEO efforts, their "slashtags" will be overwhelmed by junk.
Read how Craigslist lost the battle against spam. They tried CAPTCHAs. They tried requiring unique email accounts. They tried phone verification. Nothing worked. There are power tools for defeating each of those. Most of the recommendation systems have similar problems. To check this out, read Citysearch recommendations for some category like carpet cleaning or locksmiths, cut out some unique phrase from a recommendation, and search for it to see in how many other recommendations it appears.
The only recommendation systems that really work are ones where either the number of recommendations per item is huge (as with movies and TV), or recommendations are tied to transactions (as with eBay or Amazon.)
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