Seo blogs today and over the weekend have gone crazy with the NYT outting of J C Penny as google slapped on a penaly to their rankings..
Your be able to read it here if you haven’t already http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
I’m sat on the fence with this one as I could reports 1,000’s of sites per day but what the hell would I get out of it? NYT got JPC a penalty…
Maybe google should offer me a £1 per site not sticking to the RULZ..
I’m sure google has many honey pots as do I for me and my clients catching what the competitors are up to…
Anyway SEL has a great write up from ex-googler Vanessa Fox here http://searchengineland.com/new-york-times-exposes-j-c-penney-link-scheme-that-causes-plummeting-rankings-in-google-64529
SEL have this backlink profile posted:
This is the real interesting thing to me in why it ranked and also why it did it not get caught and NYT had to give google a tip off?
Firstly the ranking reason is clear, many domains with about 1 link per domain… This of course looks like many people are “voting” hence an increase in the serps..
Secondly “why didn’t google catch it” well in my opinion which many seem to agree with is the google would of but had yet..
Pretty simple… Now of course exposure = a higher chance of getting caught…. so using the above method for low traffic turns you more likely to be never caught but then will you get some ROI, that’s for you to decide…
Anyway the graphs showing that these spikes should be flagging them to google is what is interesting to me and reminds me of a post which I’m going to blog soon and linking and Fibonacci.
I play on the fx market and Fibonacci is one amazing tool to see what us humans think is “natural” and you can map fibonacci to linkage profile, content etc… keep an eye out for that one 😉
ok… Here some good reading on the JCP from today:
