LSF Interactive Blog

Google penalized JCPenney.com for the same reason that the IRS targets high-profile individuals for tax evasion. When the IRS wants to remind people to pay their taxes, they find a high-profile person who has been less than honest and goes after them with everything that have. When this happens, news outlets pick up the story and tens of millions of people hear about it. The IRS wouldn’t be nearly as scary if they were not constantly in the news.

Google chose to penalize JCPenney.com for the same reason and it worked very well. The story made the front page of the New York Times (print and online) and was read by tens of millions of readers, readers outside of your standard SEO community. Google has traditionally been able to communicate with SEOs very easily, but the reason behind this strategy was to get to the non-SEO and marketing decision makers and alert them to the problem. Most of these readers were completely clueless of things like penalties and blacklists. It sent shock waves through the business world and created a lot of questions to a lot of SEOs. Last week was a busy week of explanation and putting out fires to say the least.

So what was Google’s overriding message? Were they saying not to do SEO? Of course they were not. Google is very active in the SEO community. They sponsor every one of the SEO events. Matt Cutts is the official ambassador to the SEO community who speaks at these events. Good SEO is valuable to Google; it gets good content to the top of their lists. What they wanted was to send a message that aggressive SEO tactics won’t be tolerated, and that if they are willing to penalize a high-profile site like JCPenney.com, they will penalize any website.

There is not a doubt in my mind that JCPenney.com will recover all of its rankings, for the simple fact that JCPenney.com helps Google by providing valuable content in their search engine. Without JCPenney.com in the search results, Google is less valuable.

So who is at fault here? Was it JC Penney’s fault? Can they plead ignorance? In this case, I think so. JC Penney is a big company, with lots of people. Most likely a mid-level marketing manager made the decision to hire an SEO company because someone told him that is what you do when you are an online business. When this mid-level manager was hiring an SEO company, how could he separate the overly aggressive SEO companies from the legitimate ones? How could Google be upset that JC Penney was running an SEO campaign when they provide so much support to SEO companies? Google even owns their own set of SEO tools (Google Webmaster Tools, Analytics) so they can hardly scoff at the fact that JC Penney was doing what everyone else does. Did JC Penny choose the wrong firm? Probably. But if the decision makers of JC Penney knew that this company was doing un-approved methods, they would have most likely fired them.

Google was simply using the mass media to spread the gospel of anti-spam outside of the SEO community. I would not be surprised if this pattern continues in the near future. It would be a great service to the community if Google came up with a certification for SEOs. And it would give businesses an easier way to hire SEO partners to run their campaigns.