JC Penney’s Black Hat Links
Posted: Thu Feb 06, 2025 6:59 am
JC Penney ranks at the top of search results for a multitude of keywords, from “skinny jeans” to “home decor.” The retailer’s strong performance in search results coincides with the holiday season. This strong performance in search results is thanks to black hat SEO link building techniques that slipped under Google’s radar.
Doug Pierce discovered more than 2,000 backlinks . These links contained anchor text with keywords that JC Penney wanted to rank for on search engines. Many of the links were found on websites that had nothing israel mobile database to do with JC Penney. The topics of these websites ranged from casinos to cars. JC Penney claimed that it was not responsible for the links it discovered in an interview with The New York Times .
Google confirmed that JC Penney's actions violated their webmaster guidelines and revealed that they had violated the webmaster guidelines on three previous occasions. JC Penney dropped nearly 70 positions on Google for terms such as "living room furniture."
Sprint's user-generated spam
In 2013, a user named Redleg x3 posted on Google's Webmaster Central forum explaining that Sprint had received a notification from Google warning about user-generated spam on their site. Google's Matt Cutts commented that he could see that most of the spam had been removed from the site. He explained that the company should ".y to catch the spam faster, or see if there's some way to make it harder for spammers to post large numbers of messages on community pages.
Doug Pierce discovered more than 2,000 backlinks . These links contained anchor text with keywords that JC Penney wanted to rank for on search engines. Many of the links were found on websites that had nothing israel mobile database to do with JC Penney. The topics of these websites ranged from casinos to cars. JC Penney claimed that it was not responsible for the links it discovered in an interview with The New York Times .
Google confirmed that JC Penney's actions violated their webmaster guidelines and revealed that they had violated the webmaster guidelines on three previous occasions. JC Penney dropped nearly 70 positions on Google for terms such as "living room furniture."
Sprint's user-generated spam
In 2013, a user named Redleg x3 posted on Google's Webmaster Central forum explaining that Sprint had received a notification from Google warning about user-generated spam on their site. Google's Matt Cutts commented that he could see that most of the spam had been removed from the site. He explained that the company should ".y to catch the spam faster, or see if there's some way to make it harder for spammers to post large numbers of messages on community pages.