The bigger you are, the harder you’ll fall. That’s a typical perception in the business world. Retail giant J.C. Penney, with over 1,100 stores nationwide and billions of dollars in revenue, is no exception to this rule. The department store has become a staple for a wide assortment of products – from men and women’s apparel and jewelry/accessories to home goods and even furniture. A company of this magnitude – in size, staff and spending power – surely will invest the time, energy and money into hiring a top-notch SEO agency to execute their Internet Marketing campaigns. Clearly, not. And they’re feeling the pain in a very public way. In the past 3 days alone, when you enter the keywords “J.C. Penney” and “paid links” in Google, more than 500 results (and that’s a low estimate) come up.
Doing SEO The Right Way
Once the dust settles, the bigger question will be: Is it possible for brands to achieve the same SEO success as J.C. Penney (before they were caught red-handed) without using paid links? Speaking personally from my agency-client experience, it’s not only easy, but very effective.
Havaianas is one brand that’s executing SEO the right way (with our help) and seeing tremendous results. The casual footwear brand’s website (www.havaianas.com) is designed to offer customers a very flash/rich media heavy shopping experience. To offset this, they’ve focused their SEO strategy to rely primarily on inbound links with partners and industry-related web channels. And it’s been working – Havaianas is ranked high on Google when searching the keyword ‘flipflops’, despite the fact that this branded keyword is nowhere to be found throughout the website’s dozen or so landing pages.
Ethics Vs. Business Sense
In the world of optimization, there’s always a push-and-pull tug between adhering to Google’s inherent SEO ethics and generating the most effective web optimization – and earnings – for clients.
There’s a reason AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Alta Vista, Hotbot, Ask.com and others have lost their clout as leaders in search – they value their advertisers’ experience more than that of the users. It’s a common known fact among digital agencies that having a website and a credit card could get you page results on their search engines.
On the other hand, Google is the only search engine that places a higher premium on the user experience. Quality trumps the aforementioned criteria for smaller search engines – a website must be reputable and the web design itself should be high-quality. While I admit that fair competition is crucial in any industry, it’s just common knowledge that Google is the King of Search. As the most vocal and respected search voice, it goes without saying that they would implement very public codes of SEO conduct. And for Google, buying paid links is tantamount to first degree murder. As an agency and a brand, if you want to get in on the success of Google search, then you have to be willing to face the consequences if you cross their line.
New York Times: Impartial News Provider or Biased
Since the J.C. Penney spam links story first broke last weekend in the New York Times, there’s been talk about whether New York Times had a personal agenda when it launched its independent investigation into what J.C. Penney was doing. Does the fact that Macy’s is the news publication’s largest advertiser, not to mention a major competitor to J.C. Penney, have anything to do with the New York Times’ role in the whole situation? In my professional opinion, I don’t think there’s any direct correlation between the two factors.
Some SEM/SEOs might disagree, but I think Google did the right thing by intervening manually when J.C. Penney stepped out of line and they should do it every time. The Google algorithm is designed to evolve and change whenever anomalies are detected and reported. Look at what happened with the DecorMyEyes bullying incident. Google took an SEO beating, learned from its mistakes and subsequently, implemented new systems and processes to prevent it from happening in the future. It’s pretty simple – people and companies can go on for days, months and even years doing something that skirts the boundaries of ethics and “greater good”, but nothing will change until someone catches and punishes them for their misdeeds. And Google isn’t the only search engine that scrutinizes paid links, so do Microsoft and Bing. Now that the J.C. Penney situation caught Google’s attention, Microsoft and Bing are making changes to their algorithms too. Like any technology, there has to be some human element powering search and tweaking the model on a regular basis for the better.
Business First, Google Second
I’m a business owner first and an SEM professional second. That being said, most businesses – whether they’re multinational corporations, Fortune 1000 brands or small businesses – have one common goal: Build their brand awareness, generate revenue and top Google search results/page rankings without paying (organic search). So it’s not really a one or the other type of equation – they coexist: business comes first; Google is a close second.
Google Doesn’t Know Everything
Unless Google is a superhero with special powers to predict the future or time travel, there’s no way that Google can detect paid links. It’s really similar to the tenants of criminal justice – you see a crime happening, you report it and punishment (justice) is doled out to the offender. So I’m not keen on subscribing to the “Google has the power to always detect paid links” train of thought and believe it’s something that will happen on a case-by-case basis.
