I am sure all of you read the NY Times piece from the weekend named The Dirty Little Secrets of Search. It talks about how major realtor, J.C. Penney, had unbelievable Google ranking for many keywords that brought them tons and tons of e-commerce income for several months – but how those rankings were achieved through link spamming.

Of course, J.C. Penney management claims they had no clue what their outsourced SEO company was doing and fired them immediately after speaking with the NY Times. But all those months, they had number one rankings for keywords like �skinny jeans,� �home decor,� �comforter sets,� �furniture,” “dresses,” and the list goes on and on. They reaped the short term reward and now find themselves publicly humiliated and penalized in Google.

If you want to learn more of exactly what J.C. Penney’s SEO team did on a technical level, read Vanessa Fox’s explanation at Search Engine Land.

There is, as you would imagine, tons of discussion around this in the SEO community.

Here is one quote from WebmasterWorld from Tedster, but the forums are definitely worth a read:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Sphinn.