Major corporations using blackhat techniques - what does it say about things?

I came across this article on the NY Times about how JC Penney was recently caught engaging in tons of blackhat SEO techniques to get themselves ranked for thousands of keywords during the Christmas season.

Here's the full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Though I'm sure their brand was temporarily damaged and may be a PR nightmare of sorts, I'm sure financially, they reaped sales like crazy during Christmas season.

The article reports them being ranked #1 for things from "dresses" to "grommet top curtains" to "Samsonite carry on luggage."

What do you make of this?

 

I am certain that they are not the only company that is doing this - hence why they will be made an "example" as a warning to others.

 

that is just plain smart and stupid on their part. it will come back to bite them I am sure. I found a local professional seo guy doing some classic back hat tactics and reported a few of his sites to google.

 

It just goes to show you that major corporations will try to cheat as welll.

 

hmmm it's not surprising really I guess.. you have to ask what kind of marketing strategies these big guns used in the FIRST place to even get so big...no doubt a bit of blackhat technique is way down the list of their sins! lol

 

There's really no surprise here. A lot of large companies will hire "experts" to build links to their sites, and these experts are the ones implementing these links building tactics. Since the company is so large and the domain is probably trusted by search engines, it probably usually works. This is a special case where a manual investigation took place on a website that most would never think to look for it. It only worked for a short time because of domain age and trust (them being a huge company), but it will come back to haunt them in the end.

Just because large corporations do this doesn't make it ok. No spamming, guys, it will not help your site and makes people hate you.

 

Of course "big boys" are doing Black hat, it is very powerful and combined with white hat it is working like a charm

 

Well, I guess that sums up the powers of Black Hat Marketing....
But then again, it also shows how too much can get you caught. The fact that it happened was strange enough, yet it mentioned the "Spam Cop" also found out BMW doing the same in 2006. I wonder if they are both banned from adwords accounts now. Hell, I just done some key word research and made up some BS domain that happened to be an adsense site that I forgot about even making. Months later, I log in to run a campaign to find out my account was banned. The only way to get unbanned was to get the dude who owned the site to change it or take it down...

SO I guess we know how well that would go....

Probably about as well as JC Penny's round with google will go...lol

 

TBH - having worked with a lot of large brands in the past - I'm pretty sure it wasn't part of an official 'strategy'. It will be someone completely ignorant in their digital marketing team who hired an inethical search marketing firm and thought they were being really clever. There's going to be a lot of red faces at JC Penny wondering how the hell it happened.

 

It's always good to do what competition does, but avoid extreme black hat. They will eventually get penalized and you don't want to get caught in the whirlpool.

 

I find it doubtful the the 3rd party search engine marketing provider would engage in such practices at this large of a scale without direct approval from their sponsor client at JCP.