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.'"

Comments

Re:Let's help them

[TheRaven64]

I was going to tell you that's a waste of time, because Slashdot adds rel="nofollow" to all links, but I thought I'd better check that it still did before making an assertion. It turns out that the source code for this page only contains one link with the nofollow flag set - the one to timothy's homepage.

Bing

[eison]

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.

Google penalty box

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Bad day at Mountain View

[Animats]

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.

Re:Google is being too lenient.

[kimvette]

No. There are mom & pops who get suckered into SEO promises on a daily basis. There are two kinds of customers who use SEO: those who don't know any better, or are unaware their "designer" is engaging in black hat SEO, and those who entertain the idea for a while and decide to take the risk.

Those who risk black hat SEO

Here's the situation: unless you are in a totally saturated market it is extremely easy to achieve high placement organic search results if you follow Google's guidelines. You don't have to cheat at all but you do have to pay careful attention to having relevant content, clean HTML, and following accessibility guidlines helps a great deal as well. Don't spam your META tags but don't ignore them either.

We've had a couple clients leave to go with SEO specialists who happen to also build web sites, because we do web development but take advantage of Google's recommendations in the process. One client in particular - we'll just refer to him as P. for now, kept asking us about SEO every time traffic power contacted him (always under a new and different operating name because as you know every time Google finds them they punt them from the index, along with all their clients). P. did listen to us about not going with that company but has been suckered by six or seven different independent "SEO consultants."

Now, P. is in a very competitive, saturated market but even so we had achieved respectable search results. We recommended he start submitting his product to third-party distributors and ask them to link back as part of the effort to increase distribution, maybe get a few contractors to exclusively rely on his products and link back to P.'s site, and maybe get a few independent review companies and labs (like Consumer Reports) to review his product, and they would of course link to his site in the review. We also recommended a good Google adwords campaign until his product achieved critical mass.

Another thing you need to know about P.: He is not frugal but he is cheap. He would phrase things like "can you do me a favor and. . . " or "how hard would it be to. . . " and try offering $100 or even as low as $25.00 for something that would require 20 hours or so to implement, test on a staging server, then back up the live server, deploy, and re-test. He just doesn't value anyone's time. I don't understand how but one of my partners had the patience to deal with him, but by the end my patience had long run out, and one time I asked P.: "Oh, you want that for $100? Say, can you come and $foo my $bar in three different $zags for $100.00? No? Then let me ask you this: why is it your time is so valuable, but no one else's is? (The truth is I wanted him gone since he kept one of our engineers on the phone hours each week picking his brain, under the guise of negotiating but unfortunately he was with us another two years. I also worded it a bit more diplomatically than that, but it was the general point). In fact it is my fault we ever got involved with P. in the first place. He suckered us and I believed he was having a hard time getting his product out there, so I convinced my partners to take him on and help him out, giving him a fully-populated web site for $1,200.00. It was based on OS Commerce to save ourselves time so the HTML output wasn't the cleanest but we explained the pros and cons to him up front, and he decided to go with it. Over time we cleaned up some of the HTML output but over the years he was with us he kept asking for better search results, and a nicer design. We would come back with a detailed quote including graphic design time, implementing the design and then development of the features he wanted, and even though we gave him a really good deal, he would come back with something about how the original site cost him only $1,200.00. (hint: don't ever do favors for a cheapskate; they never appreciate it)

Within a couple of years he was netting $360K per year. For a one-man shop doing what he is doing, competing