
Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets - atularora
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html
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benologist
There's no dirty little SEO secrets!

Tagged with seo, dirty, dirtyseo, secrets, littlesecrets, little secrets,
dirtylittlesecrets, dirtyseosecrets, dirtyseolittlesecrets, dirtylittle
secrets, dirty littlesecrets, dirty little secrets, dirty seo, dirtyseo, seo
secrets, seosecrets, secrets of seo, dirty secrets of seo.

PS. Don't forget to link companies, products and names to your own sites, and
remember if you get caught putting _two_ external links in an article you get
fired!

<3 Engadget, and most pro-i-cant-believe-this-is-what-was-supposed-to-replace-
journalism blogging.

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credo
_"I think we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of
searches - informational and commercial," he said. "If you search ‘cancer,’
that’s an informational search and on those, Google is amazing. But in
commercial searches, Google’s results are really polluted. My own personal
experience says that the guy with the biggest S.E.O. budget always ranks the
highest."_

~~~
gojomo
Perhaps, for predominantly commercial searches, the old 'goto.com' (which
became Overture) had it right: top results should be blatantly (and honestly)
paid-for.

Google could implement this by showing more paid results for commercially-
motivated searches – while allowing users to dial this back down if desired.
(They do this a little with the varying number of AdWords units above natural
results.)

 _Pretending_ the top results are not going to the largest budget, simply
because they're the result of massive investment in gray SEO rather than
direct payments to Google, is in some ways the worst approach. It enriches
some shady operators, and has negative externalities polluting the rest of the
web.

At one point years ago someone – I think it was Yahoo – experimented with a
slider atop results that let you bias your results in a more- or less-
commercially-oriented direction. It might be time to try similar experiments
again, with a new UI and the now-more-sophisticated searchers of today.

~~~
nostrademons
Google does this already - compare [flowers] with [ipad] with [ghc syntax]:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=flowers>

<http://www.google.com/search?q=ipad>

<http://www.google.com/search?q=ghc+syntax>

There used to be "More/fewer shopping results" in the left nav as well, but
these seem to have been unlaunched.

~~~
storborg
That's not Google's doing, that's just representative of the adwords
inventory. Obviously, there is no advertiser anywhere who's going to pay for
the keyword "ghc syntax".

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byrneseyeview
I work with Doug Pierce, who is mentioned in the article. If any HNers have
any questions about this story, I'm happy to answer the ones I can and pass on
any that I can't.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
How did J.C. Penny's get singled out for the story?

~~~
byrneseyeview
Size and egregiousness, I think. There are worse offenders, and there are
bigger companies that play fast and loose with SEO, but this is the biggest
company to do something so black-hat.

~~~
gwern
How was it detected? Just noticing Penney seemed to be ranking awfully high in
a lot of searches, or something else? (I ask because the blackhattery
mentioned in the article didn't seem very noticeable in its own right.)

~~~
byrneseyeview
Yeah, just noticing it.

I actually figured out what the basic strategy was, but Doug dug up a _ton_ of
data on exactly what they were buying. Some of it is kind of insidery stuff
you'd want to know if you were an SEO but not if you were a typical _Times_
reader. (David Segal does a really impressive job in general of writing about
this stuff in a way that's understandable to the average person. I hope he
does an article about white hat SEO some time, so I can cite it when I explain
SEO to my clients.)

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jeffreyrusso
Interesting that the New York Times seems to have done all of the footwork in
finding & reporting JCPenney in order to have a ringside seat to the public
hanging. There is only really a passing mention of the NYT's direct
involvement... I don't have any problem with them outing an obvious example of
manipulation with paid links, but I wonder if they are unsure how some will
react.

------
topherjaynes
I'm curious how The NYTimes got tipped off to this story before Matt Cutts and
the Spam Team. Since this had been going on for month, I wonder how long The
NYtimes had been investigating it. The article says, "Last week, The Times
sent Google the evidence it had collected about the links to JCPenney.com."

------
greyman
Where is the boundary beyond which the link-building is considered black hat?
I remember in the past black hat was referring mostly to deceptive tactics
like invisible links, serving different page to Google and to humans for the
same URL, etc.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
Our quality guidelines are here:
[http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3)

We've talked a lot about why buying/selling links that pass PageRank violates
our guidelines. The best starting point is probably this blog post:
[http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/informati...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/information-
about-buying-and-selling.html)

~~~
portman
Blatantly off-topic, but...

Matt, you are _everywhere_. I'm amazed that you have time to actually _do
work_ , let alone sleep, considering how prolific you are on blogs and forums.

It gives me the Warm Fuzzies™ to know that an actual human being is
indefatigably fighting search spam 24/7. On behalf of teh interweb, thank you.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
Thanks; I get to work with a wonderful/smart group of people at Google--
they're doing the really hard work. Both webspam and search quality folks are
crunching on linkspam and content farms, so I hope we'll have more to talk
when some of the things in the pipeline make into production.

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waterside81
Glad to see the folks at SEOMoz getting a hat tip, albeit indirectly. This is
the tool that the researcher used to discover JCP's links:

<http://www.opensiteexplorer.org>

~~~
teyc
I thought Yahoo site explorer shows more links than just 1,000?

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Zakharov
How long until someone pays for blatant black-hat SEO on a rival's site in
order to get it trashed in the google ratings? How would you be able to tell
whether that's happened?

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mkr-hn
For anyone who wants to take a look at the links heading to the site:
<http://preview.tinyurl.com/jcpseo>

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jonathanjaeger
So if JCPenney sells black hats.. shouldn't they rank #1 for black hat?

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PHPAdam
This story should be more about Google's ranking code than a none story about
JC Penny paying a SEO company, who did their job.

Matt_Cutts, people pay 3rd partys to "get me to the top for xx" when they
deliver, you penalize then into oblivion?

~~~
sabat
Yes, Google does generally penalize that behavior, if the SEO companies cheat.
Do what JC Penney apparently did -- use a load of unrelated sites to
artificially boost its standing in search results -- and Google has a good
reason to penalize you. Google can only stay trustworthy (and therefore
relevant) if it eschews results like that.

