How does Google know what website to buoy up to the top of its search results page? If there are enough reputable websites on the Internet with links to a given page, Google thinks that there’s probably something pretty special about that page. It gives that page to boost. That’s if you want valuable organic results that you don’t pay Google an advertising fee for.
Search engine optimization companies are often asked if there is another way to pay to get your results bumps to the top. But this one requires going around Google. If, you happen to own a website about embroidery and you want to see your website move up in the search results when someone searches with the keyword phrase “embroidery craft”, for example, you need to contact other websites that deal in embroidery-related stuff and ask them to link to your website for that keyword phrase. If you can’t find any other embroidery websites to link to you, you can just go to any no-name website that deals in garbage of any kind, pay them a fee and ask them to link to your website just the same. If you have a thousand websites (dealing in any kind of stuff that bears no relation to what your website deals in) like this linking to yours, Google is still going to be impressed until someone alerts it as to what is going on. And that is what this retailer did.
Or is it? The European Union is questioning major advertisers on Google to learn if Google gives them preferential treatment in the organic search results in return for a lot of advertising revenue from them. If things like this didn’t happen, how would one explain how JCPenney got away with it for so long? There’s no way to prove it right now; but if these are the search engine optimization techniques the search engines are rewarding, there really is little hope for regular businesses with small budgets.
