J.C. Penney’s PageRank
Back in February, when you searched some words on Google, such as “dresses”, “beddings”, or “area rugs”, J.C. Penney all showed up in the first spot surprisingly. And this performance actually lasted several months. Admittedly, J.C. Penney is one of the largest retailers in the U.S., but it is still impossible for it to show up in the first place every time you search something like “skinny jeans”, “home decor” or even “Samsonite carry on luggage”. The truth behind this is that J.C. Penney’s search engine consulting firm used a trick called “black hat” optimization, which is considered to be cheating by Google.
This “black hat” optimization is closely related to the concepts of hubs, authorities and updating rule mentioned in our class. The basic process for “black hat” optimization is that you buy a huge amount of links, including a lot of abandoned sites or using hidden or invisible text, that serve as hubs and all link to your website. Then according to the hubs and authorities updating rule, your website will have most in-links even though most of the links is irrelevant to the contents this website. Then it will have higher authority score and thus show up in a higher spot. In this particular example, for those in-links found, “Some of the 2,015 pages are on sites related, at least nominally, to clothing. But most are not.” According to the passage, the contents of those links to J.C. Penney range from “diseases, cameras, cars, dogs” to “glass shower doors, jokes and dentists”. So we can see that most of the links were bought only to boost J.C. Penney’s PageRank. Based on this passage, I can draw the following hubs and authorities graph to illustrate the J.C. Penney’s “black hat” optimization.
Suppose nodes X, Y and Z are some other websites. When we use hubs and authorities update, J.C. Penney has the most in-links (though most of them are junk links) so its authority score will build up very quickly. As a result, it shows up at the first place.
As we can notice, Google didn’t find out a way to deal with this kind of “black hat” optimization. However, if people keep using this “trick” to earn a high spot, Google will definitely update its algorithm and figure out a way to detect it.