J.C. Penney has just been caught in the middle of a very ambitious search-engine manipulation scheme, and Google isn't thrilled  about it.

Google has just caught and cracked down on what is arguably one of the biggest attempts at manipulating the company's search engine rankings. While stories like this aren't uncommon when it comes to spam tactics and black hat seo -  it is usually from little guys -  not retail giants, who should no better!

They achieved  high rankings by buying thousands of links --most of them on totally unrelated sites. This is totally against Google's rules.

Online expert Doug Pierce discovered that, when he searched for "dresses", there were over 2,000 sites listed that referenced dresses. However, many of these sites had nothing to do dresses, but they included text links to J.C. Penney. In fact, many of these sites were nothing but link farms.

J.C. Penney  got  a  good bitch slap!  And  immeadiatelt fell of  page one and dropped to page 10!  Of course, JCP  isn't happy about this. The retail chain fired SearchDex, it's search engine consulting firm. A spokeswoman for the company denied any wrongdoing in the matter, and the company issued the following statement following Google's response: "We are disappointed that Google has reduced our rankings due to this matter, but we will continue to work actively to retain our high natural search position."

Previously Google had totally removed BMWs site from their search index for a while because BMW was using hidden text.

Google has said that now they are going to be even more aggressive when it comes to going after websites that are not playing by the rules.

Bottom line: Don't be tempted to violate Google's rules even if you
do see other companies doing it and getting away with it.