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Google Punishes JC Penney for Advertisement Manipulations

Recently, J.C. Penney was caught in the middle of a highly manipulative search engine campaign, and Google definitely isn’t excited about this news.

Yes, Google has recently cracked down on what is considered to be one of the biggest search engine ranking frauds today. While such stories aren’t essentially rare, especially when we’re talking about spamming tactics, one would expect such stunts to come from smaller and lesser known companies. But the accused party in this case is none other than retail giant – J.C. Penney!

According to a recent article in the New York Times, people started getting very suspicious when it was revealed that J.C. Penney was the number 1 result for a wide variety of searches; including some searches that people wouldn’t even associate with the company! Since then, the Times requested Doug Pierce, the online search expert from Blue Fountain Media to help them understand how this could be possible, and the man came up with enough evidence to really upset Google with regards to this company.

Doug Pierce found that when he searched for the word “dresses”, there were more than 2,000 websites listed. However, most of these sites didn’t have anything to do with dresses at all! Instead, most of them had text links that linked back to J.C Penney; making them nothing but link farms!

The Times then contacted Google and informed them about this. Google clearly wasn’t very happy with this information, since it was a clear violation of the search engine’s advertising terms. What’s more, it was also found that J.C. Penney had also violated Google’s guidelines at least 3 times in the past. What followed next was Google taking some immediate and harsh actions. Many of J.C. Penney’s no.1 ranking results were pushed into oblivion in the same day.

Next time, you plan on deceiving Google and not following the guidelines in the ethical manner, you better think twice.

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