Black Hat Techniques?

Internet Reputation Management is committed to providing the best search engine optimization services available for our clients without using 'black hat' techniques. An article in the New York Times citing JC Penny's extremely aggressive search engine optimization efforts has promted us to reiterate clarify our search engine optimization guidelines.

Internet Reputation Management has, to our knowledge, never caused a site or web page to be banned from the Google index. The techniques used by the SEO firm utilized by JC Penny vary dramatically from those used by Internet Reputation Management. As the New York Times pointed out, JC Penny used aggressive link building from irrelevant sites, some weren't really sites at all "Some of these sites seem all but abandoned, except for the links." JC Penny used "link schemes" with thousands of links from unrelated sites. This is a technique Internet Reputation Management does not use. We are surprised the search engine optimization firm JC Penny used engaged in such aggressive techniques.

In the end, JC Penny was not banned from Google. Google instead corrected their rankings to where they should have been in the first place. Corrective action from Google has resulted in pages being temporarily removed from Googles index, as the article mentions, it happened to BMW years ago.

The techniques Internet Reputation Management uses include the creation of new, quality content, the placement of links on trusted high quality websites (using Google metrics to determine quality). Making changes to the sites themselves to help search engines find the sites more relevant for the terms our clients are targeting, and backing up the effort with social media. This isn't the fastest way to get site to rise in search results, but it has been proven safe. When we discussed our techniques with Matt Cutts face at an SES conference some years ago, he told us our techniques were within the boundaries of what Google considered safe.

For those clients that wish for faster results, we can certainly provide them using more aggressive techniques than we normally do, but we counsel those clients on the possible negative effects before doing so. Even using more aggressive techniques at the clients request has to our knowledge never resulted in corrective action by Google, because even our most aggressive techniques are tame compared to those SEO techniques utilized by JC Pennys SEO firm - we merely accelerate what we would normally would have done more slowly.

At no time does Internet Reputation Management utilize illegal practices such as hacking, doorway pages, hidden text, or by placing thousands of links on junk sites. Instead we work aggressively within the boundaries of what is considered safe by most in our industry.