As I read this NYT story on JC Penney's black hat link farms, I felt like I was in a way back machine – I mean, five solid pages of copy about … old school low-rent link-spam sites? Really? I dunno, if this is news, the news is getting stale….
As I read this
NYT story on JC Penney’s black hat link farms, I felt like I was in a way back machine – I mean, five solid pages of copy about … old school low-rent link-spam sites? Really?
I dunno, if this is news, the news is getting stale. The never-ending battle between Google and link-buying outfits is as old as search itself. The story told in the Times’ piece sheds absolutely no new light on the tale, despite leading with lines like “the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue.”
I read the piece eagerly, expecting that it would turn up a smoking gun – proof that either someone at JC Penney knowingly paid black-hat search optimizers, or proof that someone at Google knowingly looked the other way as JC Penney, a major Google advertiser, employed these tactics. Either would have been big news.
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