The New York Times Rats Out JC Penny To Google For Buying Links

I guess JC Penny was killing it on the SERPS, so the New York Times investigated, then snitched them out to Google.

This article is a great read:

http://searchengineland.com/new-yor...at-causes-plummeting-rankings-in-google-64529

 

Awesome. Great find.

Didn't believe Matt (aka "Google's spam cop" according to the NYT, LOL) when he said the algo had started to work, but Alexa bears this out. There is definitely a gradual ebb of traffic.

Funny, Google didn't say anything lately about cracking down on paid links. It was scrapers and autoblogs, then content farms they talked about.

 

I caught that too monosodium..Matt basically says "our algo was about to kick in anyway, so don't try this at home kids"

 

As far as we know, it might have been NYT workers who have set up those link farms pointing to JCPenny. What? It's not like they have anything better to do, with the decline in sales of print newspapers.

 

hmm, interesting let me check

 

If anything this is just evidence that mass backlinking campaigns still work.

 

surely it needs a look

 

The original New York Times article also points out that JC Penney was a prominent advertiser with Google: