The Weekly Feed #56: The SEO rise and fall of two online retail giants - and the tactics they used

Welcome to Issue #56 of The Weekly Feed. Since we chatted about Google heavily penalizing websites in the last edition, I have two anecdotes on the rise and fall of the worlds largest online retailers - and one of them happened today. 

But first, Feedjit is having a huge blowout Ad Impression sale this week while stocks last. We are doubling the number of ad impressions for all Feedjit Rush Ads and we have a crazy door-buster:

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We're doing this while inventory lasts and once we're sold out, we're going to revert back to our regular pricing. So if you're promoting a new blog or website, buy your ad impressions now because we won't do this again any time soon. Remember that you can schedule your ad to run at a future date, even after we end this promotion. 

Now on to our regularly scheduled programming:

The JC Penney Story

Less than 2 weeks ago the NY Times broke a story titled "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search" about JC Penny using Black Hat SEO marketing tactics to artificially boost themselves to the top of Google's search results. JCP's search marketing firm created links from a large number of spam or questonable websites back to JCP's website and optimized for phrases like "black dresses", "tablecloths", "comforter set" and other products in their range.

The result was that JCP ended up at the top of the search results - higher even than brand name manufacturers of some products. The result of the NY Times article was that Google penalized JCP. On 1 Feb JCP ranked an average of 1.3 for 59 search terms in their product range. Ten days later their average ranking was 52.

There has been some backlash from the search marketing community who feel that if they weren't a large brand who spends ad dollars with Google, they would have been penalized clear out of the search results. A ranking of 52 seems awfully generous of Google. 

The Overstock.com Story

On January 12th someone posted to webmasterworld.com SEO discussion forum that Overstock.com was ranking extremely well and it might be worth reverse-engineering why they're ranking so well. In a rare instance, the moderator on Webmasterworld actually allowed the reverse engineering to take place. 

Then after a month of picking apart their tactics the discussion wound down. Today the Wall Street Journal broke a story that Overstock.com has been penalized and they've been demoted in the search results to exactly the same spot as JC Penney: between 40 and 70. 

The discussion on Webmasterworld has a few additional comments since the Wall Street Journal story broke today - mostly political stuff.

Until this story broke the general consensus was that Overstock actually was using acceptable tactics to market their site. But Google's web spam team (specifically Matt Cutts) hangs out on Webmasterworld and Google doesn't like to be embarrassed, so they took action and you now know the result. 

So what tactics did Overstock.com use to get on page one? Simple:

1. They created PDF's that they sent to universities.
2. Each PDF was customized for each university e.g. it had the university logo, and the text was customized.
3. The PDF said that students at the university could get a 10% discount at Overstock.com.
4. It also provided specific text for each university webmaster to post on their website. e.g. Ladies jackets, comforter sets, mens wear all 10% off at overstock. The important phrases linked to those specific sections on Overstock.
5. An important point here is that the link text and links in each PDF were DIFFERENT for each university.
6. Many university webmasters posted the text verbatim on their websites.
7. Some webmasters simply put the PDF on their sites. Links from PDF documents also pass pagerank and give you a boost in the search results. Few people know this and the posting of these PDFs to university websites was the real genius of this campaign.
8. The result was that Overstock.com ended up with a large number of dot-edu links to different sections on their website. 
9. Google gives links from .edu domains a much greater pagerank score than regular links, and the result was page one for every product section on Overstock.com.

Until today when Google penalized them. If they had kept their heads down or if someone had not "outed" them on Webmasterworld, they would still be ranking #1 for a large number of categories for potentially months or years. 

That my gentle readers is the story of JC Penney and Overstock and their rise and fall. I shudder to even speculate how much money these search penalties have cost both of these online retail giants.

Have a spectacular week and weekend and I wish you the very best in your online marketing efforts. Don't forget to buy your Rush Ad before our special ends. 

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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The Weekly Feed #55: Google Heavily Penalizes Websites, Great Nutrition for your Blog Visitors and Speak2Tweet for Egyptians

Welcome to Issue #55 of The Weekly Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. The Weekly Feed is published once a week when we have news, information and helpful tips to share. Unsubscribe instructions are at the end of this message. You can read previous editions of The Weekly Feed on our blog where we may also post additional content.

Our site of the week is the awesome Nutrition search engine SkipThePie.org that gives you your very own nutrition search widget for your blog's sidebar. Visitors can get detailed nutrition data without leaving your blog. I've already put it on my personal blog so that I can look up calories before I eat them - and hopefully it helps a few of my visitors stay in shape too.

Three days ago Google launched and update that may radically affect the amount of search engine traffic your blog or website gets. They're calling it a minor update to their algorithm, but it has already had a major effect on some sites. 8 Days ago I mentioned on Hacker News that a site that was scraping the popular StackOverflow was ranking higher than them - by republishing their content. Well Google has updated their algorithm and the scraper site's traffic immediately plummeted by about 90%. The day-over-day drop is 40%. I'm not a fan of sites that steal content, but ouch!!

Here is Matt Cutts, head of Google's anti-spam team making the announcement a few days ago.

From industry buzz it seems that Google is going after two kinds of sites this year. The first is sites that scrape content from others and republish that content unmodified (scraper sites). The second is sites who have low quality content farms, where large numbers of low wage humans generate low quality content purely to try and attract search engine traffic. We've now seen hard evidence of the new anti-scraper policy but not much evidence of Google going after content farms. 

If you run a blog or content site that relies on SEO traffic, here is how you need to react to this:

1. Make sure you limit the amount of republished content.
2. If you do republish content, make sure there is at least the same amount of original content on the same page to balance it out.
3. Beware publishing large amounts of low quality content. We haven't seen any evidence of penalties in this area yet, but trust me they're coming. 

I'm also modifying my back-link strategy slightly:

Google has always had a duplicate content penalty but over the last few years scrapers have gotten good at getting around that by mixing and matching content and adding just enough of their own to have it appear unique to a machine. Now Google have made a few additional changes to their search algorithm to penalize scraper sites. The question is, what changes did they make?  

My guess is that one of the things they are looking at is the number of "deep links" you have from other websites linking to content deep in your own site. Sites that scrape content tend to have many links from high ranking sites to their home page but few links to content deep in the site because people just don't find the content valuable enough.

So one of the ways I'm reacting to this algorithm change is to make sure that it's not just our home page that is linked to, but pages deep within the site too.

Expect to see a few more changes from Google like this as the year progresses. Remember, the most important thing is to have unique and useful content and to let the right websites know about it. 

Lastly, Google just launched a service that you'll hear about in the news tomorrow to help Egyptians stay in touch with the rest of the world as the government there removes Internet and Cellphone access. It's called Speak2Tweet and it's a collaboration between Twitter and Google. Here's the quote from Google's Blog in case you don't have web access and are in Egypt:

"It's already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet."

There are already some incredible messages being posted by Egyptians including this one referring to the million person march planned for tomorrow.

On a personal note, having lived through the transition of South Africa to a democracy, I'd like to wish any Egyptians who are Weekly Feed subscribers or Feedjit members a safe and influential week! 

Best regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO

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