The Dirty Little Secrets of Search | Search for a title, author or keyword | ||||||||
The Dirty Little Secrets of Search by David Segal of The New York Times. Well-documented article from the New York Times about the rise and fall of JCPenney in Google search results in late 2010/early 2011. With more than 1,100 stores and $17.8 billion in total revenue in 2010, Penney is certainly a major player in American retailing. The company bested millions of sites. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture”, “dresses”, “bedding”, “Area rugs” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic ( “tablecloths” ) to the strangely specific ( “grommet top curtains” ). This striking performance lasted for months, most crucially through the holiday season, when there is a huge spike in online shopping. J. C. Penney even beat out the sites of manufacturers in searches for the products of those manufacturers. Type in “Samsonite carry on luggage,” for instance, and Penney for months was first on the list, ahead of Samsonite.com. Does the collective wisdom of the Web really say that Penney has the most essential site when it comes to dresses? And bedding? And area rugs? And dozens of other words and phrases? Google’s stated goal is to sift through every corner of the Internet and find the most important, relevant Web sites. The New York Times asked an expert in online search ( and SEO, Search engine optimization, topics ), Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question. What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization ( techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner ), the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.
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