There are indeed a lot of internet consultants out there these days, and sorting out the guys who get results from the guys who don’t is a difficult task for any business owner to say the least. But if you’re a company with a healthy marketing budget, you might be inclined to go for a big firm. It would be reasonable to assume that their big ticket SEO services and staff of in house experts would be a safe investment in doing things the right way. A hedge against consultants who don’t deliver, or take shortcuts to get results…
Well read on friends, another myth is about to be busted…
A recent NY times expose revealed how JC Penny got scammed by their SEO firm, a larger and well established company whom they hired to get them on page 1 of Google for the 2010 Christmas shopping season. And they succeeded, in absolutely stellar fashion. JC Penny was on page 1 of google for search terms as bland as the word “dresses” to “furniture” often ranking as the number 1 result! In fact for hundreds of terms, JC Penny was at or near the top, pushing out brands with far more relevance.
The problem is their SEO firm got these results using techniques that Google does not approve of. These so called “Black Hat” techniques involve producing backlinks to your site from essentially phony or loosely related websites created mostly for just that purpose. Google has an internal group that polices this and had warned JC Penny about this several times in the lead up to Christmas, but Google took no action. That is until the NY Times showed them how grotesque the abuse really was. Within a couple of days, Google perpetrated what they call a “manual action”. By February of 2011 JC Penny all but disappeared from Google results for almost every keyword.
The link to the full article is here. It’s fascinating read about this murky world of link selling. Cheating at link building is a bit like cheating on your taxes…tons of folks do it but only a few get audited by Google. But when you do there is no appeal, you and your business are just digitally disappeared.
Here at WSI Net Marketing, we don’t need to put your business at risk to get results. You get the security of large company infrastructure too, but one that knows how to do it legitimately and quickly. It’s the way we work and we’re proud of it.
