The major US mail-order department store J. C. Penney was top of SERPS for just about everything they sold.

Was there something suspicious happening? The New York Times newspaper decided to investigate. Yes, there were enough black hats to fill a hat rack!

Losing no time, the NYT squealed to Google. Google SpamFuhrer Matt Cutts took action, and J. C. Penney disappeared from SERPS.

Read the full story at: http://searchengineland.com/new-york...n-google-64529

So there is a lesson to be learned:

if you use black hat techniques and if somebody manually investigates you and if they tell tales to Google about you and if Google think you are worth a manual investigation and if a Google employee thinks you were naughty then Google might manually penalise your site.

So does that mean only manual investigations on a website would prove that it was using black hat methods? Does the G algorithm do no good? Anyway nice to hear that the black world would be down somehow.

In programming logic the IF following an AND would be implied.

So this

Originally Posted by C0ldf1re

if you use black hat techniques and if somebody manually investigates you and if they tell tales to Google about you and if Google think you are worth a manual investigation and if a Google employee thinks you were naughty then Google might manually penalise your site.

could be optimised to

IF (BlackHat AND (ManCheck AND Snitched) AND (GoogCheck AND NaughtyNaughty)) OR (BlackHat AND (GoogCheck AND NaughtyNaughty) )
 then 
GoogPenalty = true
end if

Originally Posted by chrishirst

In programming logic the IF following an AND would be implied.

So this could be optimised to

IF (BlackHat AND (ManCheck AND Snitched) AND (GoogCheck AND NaughtyNaughty)) OR (BlackHat AND (GoogCheck AND NaughtyNaughty) )
 then 
GoogPenalty = true
end if

Snitched you say,
Hmm nordstrom, ross, macys, sears target, the list is not very big.

This could turn out messy for the big players maybe even cheaper stuff all round if some kind of internet war breaks out......waahayyyyyy.

Originally Posted by goldhome

So does that mean only manual investigations on a website would prove that it was using black hat methods? Does the G algorithm do no good? Anyway nice to hear that the black world would be down somehow.

No google also capable of checking black hat techniques.But you can make fool to search engines for short time period not for life long.

Anyway thanks for sharing the incident.Its nice know that anyone can do manual investigation to your techniques and inform to google for penalizing.

What about sandbox and sites being dumped there for doing blackhat? How come J. C. Penney missed that?

This was a real education in the fact that it is hard to get away for long on such a large scale.

Originally Posted by xsgman63

This was a real education in the fact that it is hard to get away for long on such a large scale.

Yeah! But you all keep on trying don't you? Just not very successfully


There's isn't a great deal of difference between what SearchDex were doing and what most of YOU try to do when bombarding "social media sites", forums and blogs with links and "you most impotrant keywrod" as anchor text. It's simply that you are dumb enough to only target ONE page, where SearchDex had the GOOD SENSE to get links to pages that matched the link anchor text they were aiming for.

They were doing EXACTLY the right thing for good marketing, it's simply their methods were somewhat over-zealous to say the least

Not having clicked on the link to go over the article, I do know that Google will not hesitate to impose sanctions on retailers that try to "cheat" (so to speak) its search algorithm. I found this article several weeks ago about how Overstock tried to buy its way onto .edu pages...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...NewsCollection

after Google farmer updates lot's of popular websites outranked,maybe J. C. Penney disappeared after google panda update.

Originally Posted by extremeseo2020

after Google farmer updates lot's of popular websites outranked,maybe J. C. Penney disappeared after google panda update.

Well done, it must have been difficult to find a response that was so useless and so far off topic!!!!

Originally Posted by weblover50

What about sandbox and sites being dumped there for doing blackhat? How come J. C. Penney missed that?

As far as Matt Cutts has described it, the mythical Google "sandbox" isn't where existing sites get pushed upon penalisation, they simply get removed from the SERPs altogether.

The sandbox is actually an effect that's noticed on new sites in certain niches.

Cool.

J.C. Penney is a horrible store anyway.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Well done, it must have been difficult to find a response that was so useless and so far off topic!!!!

Limousine service in Chicago.

[Hee, hee! I took Chris's comment as a challenge!]
[P.S. I'm sure that I'm allowed to spam my own thread.]