I'm still getting used to the idea that our government is spending our tax dollars to lie to us, attack truth tellers and prop up wall street. Now it seems a lack of fair play and accountability is spreading to other American institutions. Google is the dominant player in online search and that power is especially profitable during the holiday season when many cyber shop for Christmas. It looks like JC Penney used a black hat firm to game the search results during the holiday season and Google did almost nothing until the NYT called for an interview on the subject.
In the mid 90s it was common for search engine to sell position in search results and they didn't label the results as "paid." You would bid for the top positions and you would get your slot depending on where your bid ranked. It is very much the way Google Adwords works now but that is in a separate column and is labeled "paid." Google has built and sold trust in its organic search results but it seems like some of those 'organic' results have been using steroids so to speak.
JCPenney went through a middle man and bought thousands of links on thousands of pages over months. They used the links to boost JCPenney in search results for common items. It looks like they just kept buying links until they got the number one slot. And what did Google do? Well for starters they cashed the monthly $2.5 million check that JCP wrote them for paid results and then they took their time fixing their 'organic' results:
He said Google had detected previous guidelines violations related to JCPenney.com on three occasions, most recently last November. Each time, steps were taken that reduced Penney’s search results — Mr. Cutts avoids the word “punished” — but Google did not later “circle back” to the company to see if it was still breaking the rules, he said.
So they knew JCP was gaming them but even after 3 violations JCP was #1 for a large number of product searches. Google, it seems, did not confront them ("circle back" is an unusual phrase to apply to someone who is eroding confidence in your brand) and why?....
Here’s another hypothesis, this one for the conspiracy-minded. Last year, Advertising Age obtained a Google document that listed some of its largest advertisers, including AT&T, eBay and yes, J. C. Penney. The company, this document said, spent $2.46 million a month on paid Google search ads — the kind you see next to organic results.
Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers? It’s the sort of question that European Union officials are now studying in an investigation of possible antitrust abuses by Google.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?sq=google&st=cse&scp=4&adxnnlx=1297688401-uqLKZVoDx1SKS5blOQrXPA&pagewanted=alledit: $2.5 mil/mo
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