Google issues another corporate slap down for violating search engine rules
Last week we wrote about how Google penalized JC Penny for something their search engine optimization company did – essentially broke the rules of ethical search engine ranking and placement. While Google really tries to not publicly point out one company or another, in this instance the New York Times grabbed a hold of the story and ran about 2 pages in the sunday edition – that’s a lot of copy for very obscure business (Search Engine Optimization). Basically their outside firm paid a number of other companies who were nothing other than listing sites (big pages with links to other web sites) to help JC Penney get to the top of search results for lots and lots of every day words. See the NYT article for an in-depth view: article.
This week, Overstock.com was caught using a similar tactic – they worked with a some universities and had them list links to overstock’s web site using key words. In the internal Google search engine ranking calculator, links from schools give a web site a lot more credibility than a link from regular site. This week Google notified Overstock they were in violation of the terms of use. Subsequently, their search engine ranking dropped like a stone.
So, what’s the lesson here? For the next few months, lots of reporters are going to be digging into every company’s search engine placement and try to find any issues. If you are a company big or small, make sure you or your search engine consultants are playing by the rules. If you have good content and you have good inbound partners to link from, then you will be rewarded. Google is constantly tweaking the search results grading and will continue to work to refine how companies are graded and ranked. Play by the rules is their creedo and you will be rewarded.
So what do you think about the recent ‘de-ranking’ by google of these major companies? Do you feel like you’ve been treated unfairly by Google’s ranking system? Or is is that you’ve been promised that first search engine ranking placement by a search engine consultant and they have yet to deliver?
