During the critical shopping months of the last holiday season J. C. Penney beat millions of websites to the top of the search results rankings on many competitive keywords such as "dresses", "furniture" or "home decor". J. C. even beat Samsonite on searches for "Samsonite carry on luggage". Not an easy thing to do, taking into consideration that Google's goal is to find the most relevant websites. Is it J. C. Penney a more relevant search result for Samsonite searches than Samsonite.com? So how this could have possible happened?
It turns out that J. C. Penney's Search Engine Optimization consulting firm used a "link scheme" a trick banned and highly penalized by Google, thousands of random websites with enormous amounts of keyword links to J. C. Penney's website landing pages which automatically made it the most relevant website for those keywords.
But the intriguing part of this story is that it took evidence collected by The New York Times for Google to take some action. Within hours Penney's rankings for many keywords went from number 1 to 70 and lower. Still why it took Google so long to detect such a blatant and widespread deception? it could be that the $2.46 million a month J. C. Penney spends on paid search ads made Google look the other way?
The European Union is already investigating possible antitrust abuses by Google. Money talks even for godly Google. Read the full story.
During the critical shopping months of the last holiday season J. C.
If attack is the best form of defense, Taco Bell is all out in arms. Under attack with a class action lawsuit that questions the content of its beef Taco Bell is doing more than defending itself, it's aggressively fighting back via print media with a daring "Thank you for suing us" (love this headline) and social media channels.
In my opinion this aggressive response is the right strategy, it conveys confidence and transparency. At the end my bet is that ultimately the crisis will fade away and the brand Taco Bell will stick in our minds a bit longer and no necessary for the wrong reasons. Care for a burrito?
