Paid Links at JC Penney – Google Takes Manual Action

The New York Times has quite an article about white hat and black hat SEO – entitled “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search.” It seems that all through the holiday season, Penney’s website was at the top for all kinds of retail searches, including single keywords like “dresses”. Given the amount of competition for all these keywords. something smelled funny to the Times. So they brought in an SEO consultant firm, and they found a large number of backlinks, strewn around thousands of nearly abandoned websites.