Earlier in the week, the New York Times published an article that exposed the black-hat tactics of J.C. Penney. The article detailed how the company was able to obtain #1 rankings in Google (organic listings) for virtually every product category that the company sold. This included living room furniture, dresses, bedding, area rugs, home décor and more.
This type of performance has been going on for months, clear back before the 2010 holiday season. J.C. Penney even outranked Samsonite.com for the term “Samsonite carry on luggage”.
The purpose of organic search is essentially to “read” the “actions” of the web and its virtual population so that – within the search results – Google can dish back the most relevant content based on what the population of the world (and the web) deems to be the most relevant.
So it’s not good when a company worth $17.8 billion in total revenue for 2010 goes on to generate paid links that manipulate their rank, essentially creating the impression that the collective opinion of the world is that they are the most relevant site for dresses… and bedding… and area rugs.
And hundreds of other search phrases – essentially equaling more than two thousand paid links across blogs and other irrelevant site pages that used descriptive anchor text to manipulate their organic rankings.
Since That’s Been Said – Let’s Shut Up About J.C. Penney Already
This is where I’m going to stop beating a dead horse because everyone and their brother has written this topic to death about what Penney did wrong, the lack of detection from the mighty algorithm, etc. In reading up on this topic I discovered something very interesting that I have to address because SEO is in my blood.
If I didn’t talk about this it would be a disservice.
What stood out to me is the epic fail by the New York Times to manage their own SEO. You would think they’d be marginally interested in it since they were so interested in what another major corporation was doing with paid links.
And we thought J.C. Penney was having issues.
As I dug for information and bounced around various blogs and news articles I noticed how difficult it was to pull up the original article from the New York Times – at least in organic search. Sure everyone was linking to it but I plugged in a half dozen or more search terms trying to locate the original article on my own all to no avail.
Amazingly enough even when I included “nytimes” I couldn’t find the piece.
This caught the attention my wife, primarily because I was laughing hysterically from my home office.
What I was faced with was one of the most well-known and trusted reporting brands in the U.S. (likely even worldwide) completely failing to drive effective traffic to their own piece (which was clearly set to go explosively viral) by making one of the simplest mistakes in optimization.
Slapping a generic title on their content.
While The World Focuses on the J.C. Penney SEO Fiasco…
Despite the vast authority of the New York Times in terms of web presence, they ironically failed at setting themselves up for continued organic traffic – on a post about SEO.
A simple analysis of the title shows that they neglected to include the subject of the article (The company in questions – J.C. Penny) or anything that has to do with SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Instead they opted for “Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets”.
….really?
It’s clear why they chose that – “optimization” is a buzz topic nowadays and they wanted to put a marketing hook in their title. Unfortunately the emphasis on marketing and trying to hook a reader with a journalistic title failed to embrace the power of simple SEO best practices when it comes to constructing titles.
Is it a permanent fail? No – more than likely they could adjust the issue by altering the title but several days after the launch of the piece it remains unchanged. At this point it likely doesn’t matter because so many people are linking to the original piece that they’re getting plenty of traffic anyway.
What’s unfortunate is that it’s not just the New York Times that’s making this kind of mistake. They may have the audience to generate links that will bring the traffic and make the rain come but other businesses online are not so lucky.
When they fail to construct optimized titles set up for long term search placement from an SEO standpoint they’re shooting themselves in the foot.
People search by key words and phrases. Google returns titles with relevant keywords or phrases. If your content fails to deliver in the title, then it becomes extremely difficult for anyone to find you online.
If you’re a business owner or you’re involved in marketing online, then you should take a moment to consider whether or not you’re also making this same mistake when it comes to your content deliver and content marketing.
It’s not likely that you’ve got an audience the size of the New York Times to sustain you.
To Your Success,
Joerg Weishaupt
P.s. Get more information on social media and marketing in my free primer "Building A Successful Marketing Strategy". Sign up for your free copy today.