On February 12th, the NY Times broke a story titled “The Dirty Little Secrets for Search” featuring how JCPenney tricked the Google algorithm to win top rankings for the keyword search for ‘dresses’.
More interesting is the penalty levied by Google once it discovered that JCPenney was using Paid Links to artificially boost its link popularity. Unlike BMW.de, another website that tried to trick the Google algorithm and was “removed from search results”, Google took steps to ensure their rankings for certain keywords (and associated organic visibility) were reduced sharply.
At almost the same time, Google rolled out a search update aimed at removing duplicate, or similar, content that effected between 1% – 2% of all searches. With Google’s recent algorithm changes, it is more important than ever to take charge of your SEO efforts. Our SEO Programs focus on best practices, working closely with clients on quality content generation, and ethical promotional activities that help establish your website as an online authority. It seemed as if Google was attacking web spam at the same time that they were obviously co-operating with the New York Times to publicly showcase how it will penalize even big brands for buying links.
But this was only the beginning as Google then rolled out its ‘Content Farmer’ update that effected 11.8% of all search queries. Google explained that you would now find more high-quality websites when you search at Google. What Google didn’t tell anyone at the time is that both ‘spammy’ and legitimate websites were effected by this change. Because of this, hundreds of high-quality websites have seen significant traffic decreases over the past weeks.
