The harsh reality of slamming SEO
There have been many blogs on the Google Sandbox and subsequent penalties that occur but it`s rare that we get to see a large firm become a victim of “the box” and then be re-instated after the imposed penalty time. This has happened with the American department store JC Penney in the US. Their website was sandboxed back in February this year and fixed with a 90 day penalty for aggressively attacking it`s SEO strategy. So if large websites like this one can be penalised, should we be treading more carefully when optimising a site?
There are so many methods to optimising a site that sometimes it can be confusing on where to start and to what degree you optimise each section to. It would be easy to keyword stuff the pages to the eyeballs and have several internal links per page directed to the same page but in the long run we know this could be viewed as a poor user experience and therefore detrimental. I have had instances in the past where a customer with an existing site has had good rankings and quickly moved up the SERPS but only to see it decrease in performance later on down the line. These are the sites that have had poor SEO performed on them and indeed, been keyword stuffed, linked to the hilt with completely irrelevant links and poor design. Obviously trying to explain the long-game to this customer is a potential minefield as questions regarding timeframes and costs are thrown at you as reasons not to have SEO with you. However, the importance of clean, precise and “gentle” SEO should be promoted as the penalties are a far bigger problem.
JC Penney are a renowned department store selling everything from furniture to clothing and handbags to shoes. A huge job admittedly to try and optimise for every product but they made a good effort with it and had originally shortened their product URLs on purpose in order to rank better for them. They were penalised for this it seems and their product pages are now much longer URLs. Tweaking URLs is fine but perhaps the main domain URL would be the better option when it comes to optimising rather than product pages on a large scale.
It wasn`t just URLs that were tweaked, there was also a mass of links supposedly built for long and short tail phrases and this was picked up by Google, which led to the ban. Being big and dominant is beneficial in some ways but in the world of SEO it just puts you more in the spotlight. But as JC Penney start to squint against the sunshine as it`s let out of the box, hopefully this will be a lesson well learnt and a lesson to all of us.
