A retailer drops from
1 to 71 in ranking after
Google takes action.

Pretend for a moment that you are Google’s search engine.

Someone types the word “dresses.” Or “bedding.” Or “area rugs.”

In the last several months, one name turned up in the No. 1 spot for each and every term: J. C. Penney .

The discount retailer 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 those and dozens of other words and phrases.

Google’s stated goal is to sift through the Internet and find the most important, relevant Web sites. Does the collective wisdom of the Web really say that Penney has the most essential site when it comes to dresses, bedding and other words and phrases?

The New York Times asked an expert, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York . What he found suggests that the Google search often represents layers of intrigue. And it starts in the sprawling world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.

Black-hat services are not illegal, but Google sets rules between techniques it considers deceptive and legitimate ways to increase a site’s visibility.

To understand the strategy , you need to know how Web sites rise to the top of Google’s results. We’re talking about the “organic” results - not paid advertisements - for which Google’s algorithm takes into account dozens of criteria, including one that is critical, many of which the company will not discuss. But it has described one crucial factor in detail : links from one site to another.

If you own a Web site about Chinese cooking, your site’s ranking will improve as other sites link to it.

But even links that have nothing to do with Chinese cooking can bolster your profile if your site is linked to enough of them. And here’s where the strategy that aided Penney comes in. Someone paid to have thousands of links placed on hundreds of Web sites, all of which lead directly to JCPenney. com.

A spokeswoman for J. C. Penney, Darcie Brossart, says it was not Penney.

Using an online tool called Open Site Explorer, Mr. Pierce found 2,015 pages with phrases like “casual dresses,” “evening dresses,” “little black dress” or “cocktail dress.” Click on any of these phrases on any of these 2,015 pages, and you are bounced directly to the main page for dresses on JCPenney.com.

Google warns against using such tricks . The penalty for getting caught: the company sinks in Google’s results.

Often drastically. In 2006, Google said that it had caught BMW using a black-hat strategy to bolster its German Web site, BMW.de. That site was temporarily given what the BBC at the time called “the death penalty,” stating that it was “removed from search results.” BMW at the time said it had not intended to deceive users.

The Times sent Google the evidence it had about the links to JCPenney. com.

“I can confirm that this violates our guidelines,” said Matt Cutts, the head of the Webspam team at Google . He said Google had detected three previous violations related to JCPenney. com.

On a recent evening, Google began to take action against Penney .

At 7 p.m. Eastern time, J. C. Penney was still the No. 1 result for “Samsonite carry on luggage.” Two hours later, it was at No. 71. At 7 p.m., Penney was No. 1 in searches for “living room furniture.” By 9 p.m., it had sunk to No. 68.

Penney reacted by firing its search engine consulting firm, SearchDex.

Penney also issued a statement, which said that just 7 percent of JCPenney. com’s traffic comes from clicks on organic search results. Search experts, however, say Penney likely reaped substantial rewards from the paid links.

Many owners of sites with Penney links were unreachable, but one, Corsin Camichel, 25, is an information technology security analyst in Switzerland.

The word “dresses” appears in the middle of a largely blank page on his Web site cocaman.ch. The link came through a Web site, TNX.net, which pays Mr. Camichel with TNX points, which he then trades for links that drive traffic to his other sites, like cookingutensils.net. He earns money when people visit that site and click on the ads. He could also, he said, get cash from TNX. Cocaman is home to 403 links, all of them placed there by TNX on behalf of clients. Efforts to reach TNX were not successful.

How did a campaign that had been under way for months elude Google? “Spammers never stop,” Mr. Cutts said.

Another hypothesis: Last year, Advertising Age obtained a Google document listing some of its largest advertisers, including J. C. Penney. The company, this document said, spent $2.46 million a month on paid Google search ads .

Asked if Penney received any breaks because of the money it has spent on ads, Mr. Cutts gave “a categorical denial.”


By DAVID SEGAL