David Makarewicz
SitesandBlogs
When the New York Times uncovered that a black hat SEO agency had been hired by JC Penney to boost its rankings, the
retailer was punished and its Google search engine rankings have suffered. Now, other websites are left to wonder whether their search engine optimization techniques could backfire and invite similar penalties.
Probably the most important lesson of this saga is that your company can not simply hire an SEO agency and hope for the best. It is critical for someone within your organization to understand the techniques, especially with regard to paid links, being employed by the agency.
So what types of paid links are permissible and what types will vanish your web address? The first resource should be the search engine's posted policies, such as
Google's paid links guidelines. Generally, the line is that paid links may be permissible if the links are topically relevant to the page. Where Google identifies out-of-context paid links, often placed through
techniques like reciprocal linking, link networks or triangular linking, punishment will often follow.
This scandal has created new headaches for Google as well. In the case of JC Penney, Google claimed it was instituting "manual penalties." This puts Google in an awkward position. Anytime Google does anything manually it
flies in the face of Google's typical claims that their search engine is completely objective--driven by an algorithm, not human intervention. Google will lose its considerable mojo if the public starts to believe that Google's search engines are driven by favoritism rather than math.
There are also new concerns that a devious company could use Google's penalties to its advantage by hiring a black hat SEO agency to break Google's rules
with its competitors links. Google would detect the abuse and punish the competitor's rankings. This brand of search engine sabotage would create additional headaches for Google.
