Is Google Corrupt?

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a long piece by David Segal describing in painful detail exactly how Google's search results have been totally pawned by J.C Penney. Over the holiday shopping season, the retailer received an extraordinary bounty of Google love, ranked number one in searches for "dresses," "bedding," "area rugs," "furniture," "skinny jeans," and dozens of other terms (including, probably, "Easter suits").
Is J.C Penney really the destination of choice for all these categories of products? Hell no. But Google couldn't tell the difference, because it had been gamed by J.C Penney's black-hat search engine optimization (SEO) firm, SearchDex. (SearchDex isn't talking, but J.C Penney fired the company shortly after Segal called with some pointed questions. Draw your own conclusions.)
Apparently, SearchDex buried links attached to those search terms on thousands of dormant, fake, or abandoned websites, all of them pointing back at J.C Penney.com. Google's bots detected all those links, drew the erroneous conclusion that J.C Penney was all that when it comes to skinny jeans and area rugs, and drove millions of Web shoppers toward the site. J.C Penney had one of its best online shopping seasons ever.
The problem? This is known as link farming, and it's banned by Google's Webmaster terms and conditions. With its billions, Google can afford to pay people to do nothing but sniff out suspect search results driven by link farms and punish them. You'd think with an example this egregious Google would have noticed -- especially since it had warned J.C Penney three times before about dicey search results. But no.
NewYork Times:
Matt Cutts, the head of the Webspam team at Google ... sounded remarkably upbeat and unperturbed during this conversation, which was a surprise given that we were discussing a large, sustained effort to snooker his employer. Asked about his zenlike calm, he said the company strives not to act out of anger.
Or maybe it strives not to anger companies like J.C Penney, whom the Times points out spends millions on Google ads, in addition to lord only knows how much on SEO trickery. Cutts says the idea is absurd; the European Union, on the other hand, is investigating Google for this very practice. Segal writes:
Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers? It's the sort of question that European Union officials are now studying in an investigation of possible antitrust abuses by Google.
Investigators have been asking advertisers in Europe questions like this: "Please explain whether and, if yes, to what extent your advertising spending with Google has ever had an influence on your ranking in Google's natural search." And: "Has Google ever mentioned to you that increasing your advertising spending could improve your ranking in Google's natural search?"
SEO is in the news more than ever thanks in part to AOL's swallowing the Huffington Post last week for $315 million. HuffPo is many things, but one thing for sure is that it is SEO-driven. HuffPo owes much of its success to its ability to manipulate the treatment it receives at the hands of Google (and Yahoo and Bing).
Slate's Farhad Manjoo wrote a funny piece last week discussing how HuffPo's SEO success isn't going to last forever. He was immediately attacked in the comments by SEO professionals defending their turf.
Hey, everybody does SEO, or tries to. There are perfectly legitimate things you can do to make your site more Google-friendly. On the other hand, many SEO "pros" are the cockroaches of the Internet -- turn the light on them and they all scatter.
Operate any website for any length of time and you will be approached by one of these bottom feeders. They will offer to "exchange links" or even pay you about the cost of a nice lunch for placing an article on your site or even just a few link-rich sentences. Many people do this, because they figure, why not? Nobody else is paying them to write this stuff.
The downside: If Google catches you, it lands on you like the circus fat lady falling off a high wire. After the New York Times revealed just how thoroughly Google had been punked by J.C Penney, it manually "adjusted" the PageRank for all of those terms that used to be number one down into the boonies of Googledom.
In other words, J.C Penney isn't feeling lucky any more.
If you're relying on page rank to drive business to your site, then you probably want to play it safe. But if you already don't get any Google love, it's a no-brainer -- take the money and the spammy links and run.
This is a war Google won't win. Or, at least, Google's users won't win. Because on the Web, the search race is not to the swift or the strong but to those who are willing to pay a dirty SEO firm to cultivate link farms. And you know what link farms require? A whole lot of manure.
Do you trust Google search results? Post your thoughts below

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