Frowned Upon Search Optimization
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?pagewanted=all
This article by David Segal discusses the questionable way that JCPenney was able to make its site pop up extremely high, if not No. 1, in a Google search for tons of different objects in late 2010 to early 2011 (most noticeably through the holiday season). Searches for things like bedding, home decor, area rugs, and different pieces of furniture all resulted in a link to jcpenney.com. According to Segal, the New York Times asked an expert in the online search to investigate this astonishing jump, and he discovered some “black hat” optimization, where thousands of links to JCPenney were placed onto hundreds of pages. This large increase in links made JCPenney that much more popular, because Google search is based on number of links. JCPenney denies placing these links, but Google took “corrective action” in order to correct this breach of the guidelines.
This connects very much to the link analysis and hub authority that we have been discussing in class. By thousands of links being added that led to their website, JCPenney gained a much greater authority score and therefore made Google think it was more popular because more sites were linking to it (an approval of other “expert” sites). The Authority Update Rule states ” for each page p, update auth(p) to be the sum of the hub scores of all pages pointing to it.” Google has warned companies about using “link schemes” like these, with a penalty of making the actual rank of the page fall in the search results. This makes sense, because if every site were to try to place as many links as possible the whole idea behind the Google ranking falls apart; the idea that the more links a page has makes it more likely to be the best response to a search. These excess links temporarily made Google search this that JCPenney was the best answer to many searches that it truly might not have been the best answer to. It is important for the integrity of the Google search for the links to only be true links.
brirose