Yesterday it was reported that J.C. Penney have showed signs that their Google penalty has now been lifted.
The original penalty was imposed at the end of Feb for “shady SEO practices”. Searchmetrics have published a report to show that organic search traffic is back on the rise again for J.C. Penney:
Obviously we can only speculate about the SEO activity that J.C. Penney have employed in order to get this penalty turned around so quickly. The obvious steps would be to clean up their backlink profile and remove any paid or suspicious links and then submit a re-inclusion request (which has been confirmed by Matt Cutts).
So when analysing J.C. Penney’s recent backlink history, wouldn’t you expect to see a drop in links?
No! Majestic SEO shows that they’ve actually had a significant increase in recent links. So what does this mean? Maybe they’ve bought more links :) Or perhaps they’ve had a very successful PR campaign? In fact, that is much closer to the truth!
So even when it’s assumed they’ve made large efforts to remove links, they’ve actually increased volumes by considerable amounts. But it’s not just about numbers - if you look deeper into the quality of these new links, you’ll find that the quality of these are very high. There are many global media and newspaper websites covering the story, along with hundreds of authority blogs such as Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, Econsultancy, Techcrunch etc – as well as the huge number of SEO blogs picking up on this.
That’s all without looking at the PR value of how much coverage and brand visibility they’ve generated from this. Being from the UK, I’ve got to admit – I’d never even heard of J.C. Penney before this.
So what can we learn from J.C. Penney?
- Admit your mistakes – it’s great linkbait! It would have cost them a fortune to buy links and coverage like this from the NYTimes otherwise!
- Clean up your act, quickly – figure out why you were banned and fix it. In this case it appears to be more of a manual penalty than an algorithmic one, so it’s likely to require a re-inclusion request to make sure Google are aware that you’ve corrected any issues and can reconsider the penalty.
- Make sure everyone’s aware when ban is lifted = more links! They didn’t even have to leak the news this time, there’s so many SEOs watching the outcome of this one that any change in rankings/traffic was always going to picked up on.
The end result: J.C. Penney have set a great example of how to turn a negative into a positive.
They’ve cleaned up their backlink profile, replaced these with a huge volume of very high quality media and blog links which are far more natural and defensible – and are likely to return to Google in a much stronger position than ever (certainly long-term).
A good post, however Majestic SEO cumulative view will never shown a downward trend in links as it just adds the new links from that month to the total found last month. It won’t ever take any away from that graph view.
However I don’t doubt they got a lot of links from websites talking about their penalty, so they probably will benefit in the long run.
I’d like to try and pitch this strategy to a client (!) If you look at Gocompare, they have some similar nice links from econsultancy. It would make sense for Google to devalue any links that are obtained while a site is penalised.
Mike – that’s a good point, it is a cumulative view – although even if the total number of links stayed pretty flat, they’ve done very well replacing penalised links with high-quality media/blog links!
I was going to mention that they might even get away with the odd dodgy link now that their profile is stronger! Although seeing that they’re going to be on the radar for a long time yet I really don’t think that’s true :)
Ian – agree, it would be a great think to pitch – very risky! Perhaps it would make sense if Google devalued these links in some way (maybe they do) – although where do you draw the line on the context of links not adding value?
Yeah you really can’t argue with a link from the New York times. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly they return to the previous positions. They have a much better chance of rankng now than sites that didn’t get caught, and in a year the only people who will remember their black hat tactics are people in the SEO community. The public will continue to click and purchase without any change.
Great post, congratulations
I personally always look for attempts to transform into something positive or negative to my benefit, I believe this should be part of all professionals in SEO.
Again congratulations and until next post.
hugs to all
@seobrandup
Actually, your graph tells the story pretty clearly: the penalty Google hot them with was a 90-day dump, after which they’re just . . . climbing back.
I’ve written about this before; the problem is that while they deserved to be penalized, they CAN’T just be dropped permanently, because … they’re JC Penney!
It points out a real issue with search engines, doesn’t it? How you you appropriately penalize a company that has just PART (no comment as to what part/how much) of its content acting in a dirty fashion?
Maybe it was planed to happen this way on the internet news spreads fast and a lot of sites post news about it. Hats off too them for all the free traffic.
It’s the same situation as it has been for years – Google needs to be able to ignore paid links accurately. We know they can’t – it’s still an area they struggle massively with. And because of that they put themselves in the awkward position of having to act on JC Penney’s paid link campaign – but in such a way that doesn’t damage user experience (regular searchers still expect to see big brands like JC Penney in their results).
With regards to whether JC Penney should get the benefit of the NYT (and similar) links off the back of what is basically a negative press story, well that’s a whole other problem for Google. They’d need to be able to assess sentiment well enough to make a call on whether value should be passed. If they still can’t algorithmically discount paid links I think we’ve got a bit of a wait until they crack sentiment analysis!
Surely Google knew that this would be the outcome? I personally have experienced this on lower level sites that have been punished by Google… more often than not a site will come back slightly better off than when it got the punishment.
So the crazy thing about all this is that it shows us all that the whole idea that the search engines decided about the more links the better just doesn’t begin to make any sense. Take the JC Penny Story as an example. All of these links are adding value ( New York Times, Search Engine Land Etc.)Even though NON of these sites are actually endorsing JCP in any way, or saying that they have any value. They were all just talking about a link buying story that happened to have JCP in the spot light. Should these links be adding to JCP? Are these considered votes?