The Sunday Feb 13th edition of New York Times exposed the unethical tactics used by the department store chain, JC Penny to increase their page rankings on the popular search engine Google. Penney’s spammed the search engine with bogus sites that utilized keywords throughout the internet to direct people to their home page which in effect gave them high rankings. This type of internet marketing is called black hat SEO Optimization and is a forbidden by Google who wants to maintain the integrity of their web searches.
SEO Optimization has been around since Google’s beginning and is a valuable tool for businesses to create more web traffic and revenue, if done ethically and within the parameters dictated by the search engine giant. Penney’s was discovered to have used this unscrupulous type of marketing strategy in November and reprimanded by Google, but the company continued to use this strategy. Penney’s denies having knowledge of the use of black hat optimization being employed to improve the rankings of their website. Using this type of optimization a company’s rankings can be drastically reduced
Utilizing the internet to increase business is essential in the information age. If done properly by companies who use white hat SEO Optimization the visibility of a business‘ website can be very profitable. To assure the quality of search engine results, Google relies on organic results which are determined the things people search for and search engine optimization can be a fundamental tool in marketing.
