#8 Public Floggings: January 2011
There’s plenty of talk in the SEO world about how Google tends to favor big companies over smaller entrepreneurs, that’s what made this next move so surprising. Back in the winter of 2010, Google revealed that JC Penney had been engaged in widespread black hat SEO practices.
How bad was it? A later investigation revealed that less than 10% of traffic to JCPenney.com was the result of organic searches. Cutts and and company didn’t hand out the death penalty, but JC Penney suffered a major drop in page rankings as a result of corrective actions.