AboutUs Weblog

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Don’t Do Like JC Penney – Wear the White Hat Posted: 14 Feb 2011 10:00 AM PST It’s the talk of the search engine world: J.C. Penney gamed search engine results to increase site traffic, and got slapped. The New York Times published a piece of fascinating investigative reporting on Saturday. Apparently, reporter David Segal noticed that J.C. Penney continually appeared in top search results for just about every item the retailer sells – and not just for a few days, but over many months. As it turns out, J.C. Penney was the beneficiary of black hat SEO practices. Someone – J.C. Penney insists it wasn’t them – inserted thousands of links on sites all over the Web, pointing to J.C. Penney’s site. You can put J.C. Penney’s claim of innocence in your pipe and smoke it. But it does raise an important question for any website owner who wants to make more money on the Web: How do you know you’re wearing the white hat, and not the black one? You can learn more about which SEO tactics are acceptable – and which ones are not – in the article, White Hat SEO, Black Hat SEO. We broadly outline what you can do to enhance your site’s standing on the Web that’s within search engine guidelines, and which tactics to avoid. We also provide links to a few authoritative sources for digging deeper into white hat SEO. If you want to learn more about what J.C. Penney did – or what was done on their behalf – from the perspective of a top SEO professional, you can read Vanessa Fox’s excellent article on Search Engine Land. Like the good Internet writer she is, Vanessa includes lots of links so you can browse around and dig even more deeply into spam linking – and what search engines do about it.

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