JC Penney Penalised by google for buying links

Today, the New York Times published an article about a search engine optimization investigation of  J.C. Penney. Perplexed by how well jcpenney.com did in unpaid (organic) search results for practically everything the retailer sold, they asked someone familiar with the world of search engine optimization (SEO) to look into it a bit more. The investigation found that thousands of seemingly unrelated web sites (many that seemed to contain only links) were linking to the J.C. Penney web site. And most of those links had really descriptive anchor text. It was almost like someone had arranged for all of those links in order to get better rankings in Google.

JC Penny was found to have hired a an SEO company who outsourced the buying of links to TNX.net, this meant that JC PENNY had ranked globally for highly targted keywords such as jumpers, shirts all one keyword targets. With the attempt of blackhat SEO New york times blew the whistle and wrote up a documented story on this SEO fallacy.
The New York Times Contacted Googler Matt Cutts, head of webspam, confirmed that the tactics violated the Google webmaster guidelines and shortly after, the J.C. Penney web site was nowhere to found for the queries they had previously ranked number one for. Matt tweeted that “Google’s algorithms had started to work; manual action also taken”.

Matt Cutts response on JC Penney
After google has manually reverted these rankings Jc Penny can now be found with highly searched keywords on the 4th and 5th page of google respectively.

Google Information from webmaster Central on Paid Links
Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site's value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.
However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.
Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

The results in traffic for JC Penny


Traffic has significantly decreased and sales have decreased online for JC Penny

Information on hiring an SEO Company
This is the due result of outsourcing SEO work to an SEO company that relied on blackhat SEO techniques and buying links in restricted or dead websites to raise rankings. Companies wishing to hire a reputable SEO company need to read up on ethical google guidelines and also be sure that the money they are paying for is whitehat seo and will result in postive results.