...and now has to deal with the repercussions from Google.

The NYTimes did an expose over the weekend on a name brand company who apparently outsourced their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to a shady SEO firm.

J.C. Penney was established in 1916, long before search engines were even imaginable. They find themselves in a precarious place, having been caught trying to juice their search results by Google.

Most companies who do this sort of thing are fly-by-night organizations who don't have anything to lose, so a big, known, established brand practicing this is quite a surprise.

The company bought and traded links to JCPenney.com(JCP) on other non-related websites to trick Google (GOOG) into thinking that people were naturally linking to JCPenney.com.  Naturally, JCPenney.com went up in search results.  Not just on Google either. Microsoft's (MSFT) Bing is affected too since they use the same methods to promote sites (and they copy Google!).  Soon, and during the lucrative holiday season, JCPenney was on top of a lot of searches where it naturally didn't belong.

The company undoubtedly made a lot of money from this practice.

But then Google, and reportedly its algorithms, got wind of the activity and immediately cut them down to un-naturally low status in the Google search results. More