More Link Spam Examples in Google

How to Stop Spam

How to Stop Spam

For today’s example, I will be looking at the Hot Tub industry where one of my clients has a significant interest and ranks well for many of the most sought after terms including “hot tub”, “hot tubs”, “spa” and “spas” as well as many other related permutations. Unlike JC Penny, ChooseHotTubsDirect is using a number of other link spam tactics to artificially inflate their Google rankings. Let’s take a look at some of the methods they’re using including blog comment spam, blog spam (splogs), and forum spam.

In one particular case, JC Penney was ranking first for the search term ‘Samsonite carry on luggage’, ahead of Samsonite’s own website. JC Penney also happens to be one of Google’s biggest buyers of paid search advertising.

To understand how JC Penney’s website was achieving these results, it is important to understand one aspect of how Google (and other search engines) rank websites. Search engines judge the importance of a website in part by the amount of links coming into it, and by the quality of those links. So, if your site has three incoming links, and your competitor’s has 3000, then all other things being equal, your competitor’s site will rank higher on Google for the same search term.

Google and other search engines use this measure of importance because mostly, it works. One basic example would be if you paid 3000 website owners to put links on their sites, pointing to your site, no matter what their sites were about.

This is the big question – Google had previously ‘punished’ JC Penney for other Black Hat SEO techniques, yet failed to pick up a relatively large black hat campaign that was keeping JC Penney in the number one spot on numerous highly valuable keywords for a four month stretch. What adds an element of conspiracy to the story is that as mentioned earlier, JC Penney pays Google considerable sums of money for paid search advertising through AdWords. The implication is clear – does Google turn a blind eye to black hat SEO methods used by its largest customers?

By. How to Stop Spam