Google is damaged?

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a lengthy piece by David Segal, describing in detail painful just like Google search results have been totally pwned by JCPenney. Over the holiday shopping season, the dealer where my mother used to drag me to buy my Easter dresses received an extraordinary payout of love Google, ranked number one in searches for "clothing", "bedding," "area rugs," "furniture", "skinny jeans" and dozens of other terms (including, probably, "Easter" Suits).

JCPenney is really the choice destination for all these categories of products? Hell no. But Google couldn't tell the difference, because it was gamed by Black Hat search engine optimization (SEO) company of JCPenney, SearchDex. (SearchDex not to mention, but dismissed the JCPenney company shortly after Segal called with some pointed questions. Draw your own conclusions).

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Apparently, buried link SearchDex linked to these search terms on thousands of Web sites, fake or abandoned sleeper, all of them pointing back at JCPenney.com. Google bots has found all those links, drew the wrong conclusion that JCPenney was everything when it comes to skinny jeans and area rugs that drove millions of shoppers to the Web site. JCPenney had one of its best online shopping seasons ever.

The problem? This is known as link farming, and is banned from Google Webmaster terms and conditions. With its billion, Google can afford to pay people to do nothing but sniff search results suspect them hunted from link farms and 86. You would think with an example of this egregious Google would have noticed--especially since it had warned JCPenney three times before about search results dicey. But no.

For the times:

Matt Cutts, the head of the Webspam team at Google team ... it seemed incredibly optimistic and imperturbable during this conversation, which was a surprise since we were discussing a great snooker effort supported his employer. Question about its calm zenlike, said that the company will not act out of anger.

Or maybe strives not to anger companies such as JCPenney, who recalls the times spends millions to Google ads, in addition to the Lord only knows how many misleading SEO. Cutts says that the idea is absurd; the European Union, on the other, is investigating Google to this practice. Segal writes:

It is possible that Google was willing to tolerate a wide campaign of Black Hat, because it has helped one of its biggest advertisers? Is the type of question that officials of the European Union are now studying in an investigation of possible antitrust violations by Google.

Investigators have asked the advertisers in Europe questions like this: "Please explain whether and, if so, to what extent your advertising with Google spending has never had an influence on your natural search rankings in Google." And: "Google Has ever mentioned to you that increasing advertising spending could improve your natural search rankings in Google?"

SEO is the news more than ever, thanks in part to AOL swallowing Huffington Post last week for $ 315 million. HuffPo is many things (not all of them printable on InfoWorld.com pages), but one thing is certain that is based on SEO. HuffPo owes much of its success to its ability to manipulate the receiving treatment at the hands of Google (and Yahoo, and Bing).

Last week discussing how SEO success of HuffPo isn't going to Farhad Manjoo always the last slate wrote an entertaining piece. He was immediately attacked by SEO professionals in the comments to defend their turf.

Hey, not all SEO or try to, InfoWorld included. There are perfectly legitimate things you can do to make your site Google-friendly. On the other hand, many SEO "Pro" cockroaches of the Internet--turn the light on them and they're all scatter.

Manage any website for any time period and will be approached by one of these bottom feeders. They offer a "link exchange" or even pay approximately the cost of a nice dinner for placing an article on your site or even just a few sentences of rich link. Many people do this because they figure, why not? Nobody is paying them to write this stuff.

The downside: If Google catches you, lands on you as the circus fat lady falling off a high wire. After the New York Times revealed just how thoroughly Google had been punked by JCPenney, it manually "appropriate" the PageRank for all those terms that used to be the number one down in the small Googledom.

In other words, JCPenney not feeling lucky.

If you're relying on page rank to drive business to your site, then you probably want to play it safe. But if you don't get any love from Google, is a no-brainer--take the money and the link spam and run.

This is a war that Google never WINS. Or, at least, Google users do not win. Because on the Web, the race is not swift or strong but to those who are willing to pay a SEO dirty to cultivate link farms. And you know what link farms require? A lot of manure.

Do you dare to Google search results? Post your thoughts below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, "Google is corrupt? Search me, "was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Track the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry, with notes by Robert x. Cringeley from blog and subscribe to Cringely notes from underground newsletter. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

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