But first, Feedjit is having a huge blowout Ad Impression sale this week while stocks last. We are doubling the number of ad impressions for all Feedjit Rush Ads and we have a crazy door-buster:
- Geotargeted ads get double the impressions: $49 for 2 Million Ad impressions.
- Globally targeted ads get double the impressions: $49 for 6 Million Ad impressions.
- Globally targeted ads are also available at $249 for 30 Million impressions. Usually this price only gets you 5 million impressions. We're offering a small number of these crazy door-busters.
We're doing this while inventory lasts and once we're sold out, we're going to revert back to our regular pricing. So if you're promoting a new blog or website, buy your ad impressions now because we won't do this again any time soon. Remember that you can schedule your ad to run at a future date, even after we end this promotion.
Now on to our regularly scheduled programming:
The JC Penney Story
Less than 2 weeks ago the NY Times broke a story titled "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search" about JC Penny using Black Hat SEO marketing tactics to artificially boost themselves to the top of Google's search results. JCP's search marketing firm created links from a large number of spam or questonable websites back to JCP's website and optimized for phrases like "black dresses", "tablecloths", "comforter set" and other products in their range.
The result was that JCP ended up at the top of the search results - higher even than brand name manufacturers of some products. The result of the NY Times article was that Google penalized JCP. On 1 Feb JCP ranked an average of 1.3 for 59 search terms in their product range. Ten days later their average ranking was 52.
There has been some backlash from the search marketing community who feel that if they weren't a large brand who spends ad dollars with Google, they would have been penalized clear out of the search results. A ranking of 52 seems awfully generous of Google.
The Overstock.com Story
On January 12th someone posted to webmasterworld.com SEO discussion forum that Overstock.com was ranking extremely well and it might be worth reverse-engineering why they're ranking so well. In a rare instance, the moderator on Webmasterworld actually allowed the reverse engineering to take place.
Then after a month of picking apart their tactics the discussion wound down. Today the Wall Street Journal broke a story that Overstock.com has been penalized and they've been demoted in the search results to exactly the same spot as JC Penney: between 40 and 70.
The discussion on Webmasterworld has a few additional comments since the Wall Street Journal story broke today - mostly political stuff.
Until this story broke the general consensus was that Overstock actually was using acceptable tactics to market their site. But Google's web spam team (specifically Matt Cutts) hangs out on Webmasterworld and Google doesn't like to be embarrassed, so they took action and you now know the result.
So what tactics did Overstock.com use to get on page one? Simple:
- They created PDF's that they sent to universities.
- Each PDF was customized for each university e.g. it had the university logo, and the text was customized.
- The PDF said that students at the university could get a 10% discount at Overstock.com.
- It also provided specific text for each university webmaster to post on their website. e.g. Ladies jackets, comforter sets, mens wear all 10% off at overstock. The important phrases linked to those specific sections on Overstock.
- An important point here is that the link text and links in each PDF were DIFFERENT for each university.
- Many university webmasters posted the text verbatim on their websites.
- Some webmasters simply put the PDF on their sites. Links from PDF documents also pass pagerank and give you a boost in the search results. Few people know this and the posting of these PDFs to university websites was the real genius of this campaign.
- The result was that Overstock.com ended up with a large number of dot-edu links to different sections on their website.
- Google gives links from .edu domains a much greater pagerank score than regular links, and the result was page one for every product section on Overstock.com.
Until today when Google penalized them. If they had kept their heads down or if someone had not "outed" them on Webmasterworld, they would still be ranking #1 for a large number of categories for potentially months or years.
That my gentle readers is the story of JC Penney and Overstock and their rise and fall. I shudder to even speculate how much money these search penalties have cost both of these online retail giants.
Have a spectacular week and weekend and I wish you the very best in your online marketing efforts. Don't forget to buy your Rush Ad before our special ends.
Mark Maunder
Feedjit Founder & CEO.
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