Pretend for a moment that you are Google’s search engine. Someone types the word “dresses” and hits enter. What will be the very first result ? There are, of course, a lot of possibilities. Macy’s comes to mind. Maybe a specialty chain, like J. Crew or the Gap. Perhaps a Wikipedia entry on the history of hemlines. OK, how about the word “bedding” ? Bed Bath & Beyond seems a candidate. Or Walmart, or perhaps the bedding section of Amazon.com. “Area rugs” ? Crate & Barrel is a possibility.
Home Depot, too, and Sears, Pier 1 or any of those websites with “area rug” in the name, like arearugs.com. You could imagine a dozen contenders for each of these searches. But in the past several months, one name turned up, with uncanny regularity, in the No.1 spot for each and every term: J.C. Penney. The company bested millions of sites – and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs.
For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic (“ tablecloths” ) to the strangely specific (“ grommet top curtains” ). This striking performance lasted for months, most crucially through the holiday season, when there is a huge spike in online shopping. J.C. Penney even beat out the sites of manufacturers in searches for the products of those manufacturers. Type in “Samsonite carry on luggage,” for instance, and Penney for months was first on the list, ahead of Samsonite.com.
With more than 1,100 stores and $17.8 billion in total revenue in 2010, Penney is certainly a major player in American retailing. But Google’s stated goal is to sift through every corner of the Internet and find the most important, relevant websites. Does the collective wisdom of the Web really say that Penney has the most essential site when it comes to dresses? And@ bedding ? ^And area rugs? And dozens of other words and phrases? The New York Times asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months.
What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black-hat ” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a website with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating. To understand the strategy that kept J.C. Penney in the pole position for so many searches, you need to know how websites rise to the top of Google’s results.
We’re talking, to be clear, about the “organic” results – in other words, the ones that are not paid advertisements. In deriving organic results, Google’s algorithm takes into account dozens of criteria, many of which the company will not discuss. But it has described one crucial factor in detail: links from one website to another . If you own a website, for instance, about Chinese cooking , your site’s Google ranking will improve as other sites link to it. The more links to your site, especially those from other Chinese cooking-related sites, the higher your ranking.
In a way, what Google is measuring is your site’s popularity by polling the best-informed online fans of Chinese cooking and counting their links to your site as votes of approval .But even links that have nothing to do with Chinese cooking can bolster your profile if your site is barnacled with enough of them. And here’s where the strategy that aided Penney comes in.
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