A couple of days ago the New York times ran an article on how J.C. Penney had been rumbled for gaming the organic search engine listings on Google. To do this they hired someone who is familiar with search engines and SEO. During this investigation they turned up thousands of totally unrelated sites linking in to category pages of J.C. Penney. Most if not all of these links had highly optimized anchor text and it looked to the analyzer that these links had been places in order for the store to gain top rankings in Google.
After presenting the findings to Matt Cutts of Google the head of the web spam division he confirmed to them that these practices were against the terms of Googles webmaster guidlines and soon after this the J.C. Penney started to drop out of the search results.
Take this as a warning to all that are doing SEO for clients or clients that are looking to hire SEO professionals. Make sure you know where your SEO people are placing your links and make sure that the places that they are getting placed are relevant to your brand and products.
Later Matt Cutts tweeted that “Google’s algorithms had started to work; manual action also taken”.
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