Google Spanks J.C. Penney For Advertising Violations

vansau

Mortician of Love
May 25, 2010
6,107
0
0
Google Spanks J.C. Penney For Advertising Violations



J.C. Penney has just been caught in the middle of a very ambitious search-engine manipulation scheme, and Google isn't thrilled to learn about this issue.

Google has just caught and cracked down on what is arguably one of the biggest attempts at manipulating the company's search engine rankings. While stories like this aren't uncommon when it comes to spam tactics from, say, certain dubious web games and the like, the accused party behind this scam might surprise you: It's retail giant J.C. Penney.

According to a recent New York Times article, suspicions were raised when it was revealed that J.C. Penney was the top result for a wide variety of searches that most people wouldn't necessarily associate with the company (examples include "dresses", "bedding", and "area rugs"). The Times asked online search expert Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media to help them figure out how this could be, and the man's answer was enough to upset Google it was forwarded to the company.

Pierce discovered that, when he searched for "dresses", there were over 2,000 sites listed that referenced dresses. However, many of these sites had nothing to do dresses, but they included text links to J.C. Penney. In fact, many of these sites were nothing but link farms.

The Times contacted Google with this information and wound up in an interview with Matt Cutts, the head of Google's webspam team. Cutts clearly wasn't happy about the issue, which was a clear violation of Google's advertising terms. Cutts also mentioned that jcpenney.com had previously violated Google's guidelines three times in the past (the most recent time being in November). Accordingly, Google took some pretty immediate action to correct the search engine manipulation:

On Wednesday evening, Google began what it calls a "manual action" against Penney, essentially demotions specifically aimed at the company.

At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was still the No. 1 result for "Samsonite carry on luggage."

Two hours later, it was at No. 71.

At 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Penney was No. 1 in searches for "living room furniture."

By 9 p.m., it had sunk to No. 68.

In other words, one moment Penney was the most visible online destination for living room furniture in the country.

The next it was essentially buried.

J.C. Penney, of course, isn't happy about this. The retail chain fired SearchDex, it's search engine consulting firm. A spokeswoman for the company denied any wrongdoing in the matter, and the company issued the following statement following Google's response: "We are disappointed that Google has reduced our rankings due to this matter, but we will continue to work actively to retain our high natural search position."

This is a very public black eye for J.C. Penney, but I can't exactly bring myself to feel sorry for the company when it was pretty obviously involved with something so shady.

Source: Geeks Are Sexy

Permalink
 

SonicKoala

The Night Zombie
Sep 8, 2009
2,266
0
0
The wrath of Google is swift and unforgiving - serves J.C. Penney right for trying to pull that crap in the first place.
 

Darkauthor81

New member
Feb 10, 2007
571
0
0
Ok so now we've seen the power of Google to nerf a company's listing positions.... I can certainly see this power being used for evil. Perhaps blackmail?
 

Low Key

New member
May 7, 2009
2,503
0
0
Darkauthor81 said:
Ok so now we've seen the power of Google to nerf a company's listing positions.... I can certainly see this power being used for evil. Perhaps blackmail?
They have money hungry shareholders so you never know...
 

samsonguy920

New member
Mar 24, 2009
2,921
0
0
Given the shady ads I've seen on websites "powered by Google" I have to wonder if there is more going on on their end as well.

I was so going to Penney's next week for that loveseat on sale, too.
 

whaleswiththumbs

New member
Feb 13, 2009
1,462
0
0
Google is kinder than me. I would have dropped them completely. Like googling J.C. Penney would have resulted in nothing, at all.
 

manythings

New member
Nov 7, 2009
3,297
0
0
Darkauthor81 said:
Ok so now we've seen the power of Google to nerf a company's listing positions.... I can certainly see this power being used for evil. Perhaps blackmail?
The Chinese government is careful not to cross google, and with good reason. The google corporation is a global blackmailing racket waiting to happen.

whaleswiththumbs said:
Google is kinder than me. I would have dropped them completely. Like googling J.C. Penney would have resulted in nothing, at all.
That would be a huge violation. If you could vanish from google how long before some competitor officially declares that off the table and draws a lot of googles business interests away. I wouldn't want to deal with anyone who would try to kill my company.
 

Alone Disciple

New member
Jun 10, 2008
434
0
0
For some reason, I just can't muster up the energy to even care about this. Just typing this actually took more will than I gave the story credit for.

And in the end.....the earth is still revolving.
 

FlashHero

New member
Apr 3, 2010
382
0
0
So they have violated 3 times in the past...i demand a removal of them from google...no more hits for them..i mean they can ban dougjin translators so they can ban JC Penny for breaking the rules 3 times now.
 

The Random One

New member
May 29, 2008
3,310
0
0
Goes to show how many marketers can't tell 'targeted marketing' from 'slightly less random spam'. And it's because of fuckups like this that marketers, and a buncho of other jobs, get bad reps.

Also, on the first line of the last paragraph, its, not it's, search engine consulting firm.
 

Anarchemitis

New member
Dec 23, 2007
9,102
0
0
This is what legal fights look like between big companies.

However be aware that Google is inordinately larger than J.C. Penny ever will be.
 

BENZOOKA

This is the most wittiest title
Oct 26, 2009
3,920
0
0
Serves right for them.

Don't be messing with Google. I bet there are plenty of companies who are doing the same, but haven't been caught yet or are doing it in a more subtle way.
 

GiantRedButton

New member
Mar 30, 2009
599
0
0
manythings said:
Darkauthor81 said:
Ok so now we've seen the power of Google to nerf a company's listing positions.... I can certainly see this power being used for evil. Perhaps blackmail?
The Chinese government is careful not to cross google, and with good reason. The google corporation is a global blackmailing racket waiting to happen.

whaleswiththumbs said:
Google is kinder than me. I would have dropped them completely. Like googling J.C. Penney would have resulted in nothing, at all.
That would be a huge violation. If you could vanish from google how long before some competitor officially declares that off the table and draws a lot of googles business interests away. I wouldn't want to deal with anyone who would try to kill my company.
Didn't china block google after google stopped censoring their search results?
 

emeraldrafael

New member
Jul 17, 2010
8,589
0
0
Alone Disciple said:
For some reason, I just can't muster up the energy to even care about this. Just typing this actually took more will than I gave the story credit for.

And in the end.....the earth is still revolving.
My sentiments exactly.

I'm not even sure what this will do. If you shop at JCP, you're still gonna shop there. Odds are, this wont hurt much.
 

Darkauthor81

New member
Feb 10, 2007
571
0
0
Kalezian said:
Darkauthor81 said:
Ok so now we've seen the power of Google to nerf a company's listing positions.... I can certainly see this power being used for evil. Perhaps blackmail?
surprisingly enough, one of google's goals is "to not be evil".

Google seems to take a pretty neutral stance when it comes to its search engine, look at it this way, what if you had an upstart business that sold dresses and furniture but people were unable to see your google result because the first three pages were nothing but links to JC Penny?


this of course doesnt stop the rest of us from using google for evil, the Cult of Scientology was googlebombed by activists until links to websites that were against Scientology were at a higher ranking than the actual cults website.
I want to work for a company who's stated goal is "to not be evil". Because you just KNOW that right under your cubical they're building a death ray. XD