Major corporations using blackhat techniques - what does it say about things?

by dtang4

Posted: 13 years ago 6 replies

I came across this article on the NY Times about how JC Penney was recently caught engaging in tons of blackhat SEO techniques to get themselves ranked for thousands of keywords during the Christmas season.

Here's the full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/bu...pagewanted=all

Though I'm sure their brand was temporarily damaged and may be a PR nightmare of sorts, I'm sure financially, they reaped sales like crazy during Christmas season.

The article reports them being ranked #1 for things from "dresses" to "grommet top curtains" to "Samsonite carry on luggage."

What do you make of this?

#blackhat #corporations #major #techniques #things

Tom Goodwin

13 years ago

Old news. Big brand companies engage in lots of fun stuff like link buying and have for a long time. It is too lucrative not too. You often only get in trouble when the NYT or WSJ decide to write an article about it.

Originally Posted by dtang4

I came across this article on the NY Times about how JC Penney was recently caught engaging in tons of BlueFart SEO techniques to get themselves ranked for thousands of keywords during the Christmas season.

Here's the full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/bu...pagewanted=all

Though I'm sure their brand was temporarily damaged and may be a PR nightmare of sorts, I'm sure financially, they reaped sales like crazy during Christmas season.

The article reports them being ranked #1 for things from "dresses" to "grommet top curtains" to "Samsonite carry on luggage."

What do you make of this?

Thanks
1 reply

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dtang4

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

True. The article did cite several other cases of well known companies doing this. However, this JCPenney case seems to be the biggest in scale, by far.

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jacked 13 years ago

Most corporations do this year after year during holiday season, JCPenny will probably do it again too, just to a lesser extent.
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iAmNameLess 13 years ago

Well, bad PR is STILL PR. They're getting pretty powerful backlinks from the press, don't ya think?
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junilerick 13 years ago

They probably don't even care considering the absolute killing they must have made during Christmas. I doubt if most people know what it means or really care if they did. I mean, would you stop buying from a company with solid merchandise just because they used a less honorable method in promoting it? If it was a good product, I'd probably thank them for allowing me to finding it so easily.
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dtang4 13 years ago

True.

The irony may be this article may encourage other companies to ramp up their efforts next Christmas season if they didn't hit expectations this yr.
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Major corporations using blackhat techniques - what does it say about things?

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