Search engines are like online malls. Businesses rely on the search engine to provide selling grounds and bring consumer traffic; striving to be the biggest and most attractive store in the search engine “mall”.

The issue of unethical search engine marketing strategies is driven by companies’ aim to optimize a website, improve its search engine rankings, and appear in the first 10 listings which drives customer traffic and builds a significant online presence. The issue is exacerbated since it takes tremendous effort of search engine consultants and a long time frame to successfully improve and sustain the rankings.

Recently, retailer JCPenney’s website has been flagged by Google for using unethical marketing techniques for its search engine channel. As explained by an article regarding this dilemma, services to improve search engine rankings fall into two camps: white hats and black hats. The “white hats” essentially optimize a website by following rules laid out by search engines, while “black hats” propel a website’s rankings often using methods going against requirements of search engines. Google claimed that black-hat techniques were used to fool Google into thinking the JCPenney website was relevant for a large number of search terms.

Parties involved in this issue are search engine providers, retailers, their competitors, and most importantly consumers. Search engines are faced with the difficulty of maintaining the effectiveness of their service when companies such as JCPenney are rigging search engines in order to appear in the top 10 search results. This sabotages the purpose of the search tool and also negatively affects consumers of the search engine because they cannot find relevant products and information. Insufficient monitoring causes consumers of search engines to lose trust in them and may use the search engine less and look for alternatives. Competitors may get pushed down the list of search results, causing decreased website hits, a smaller online presence, thus results in less sales for the company.

In fact, I feel that “black hat” methods won’t truly help a retailer in the end. Even though “black hat” retailers may reap rewards from the paid links that increase exposure of their brand name, increased sales won’t be sustained if consumers are mislead and the product does not match truly the key words of their search. Consumers will be considerably dissatisfied and have negative feelings toward the company due with the amount of effort and time spent into searching for a product just to find out in the end it was not what they were looking for.

In JCPenney’s example, Google responded by completely wiping them off the first page of search results for most terms as penalization. This is a huge setback for the retailer and significantly ruins their company’s image. Because one of the main purposes of a search engine and retailers is to provide benefits to consumers, in guiding JCPenney’s approach to fixing the situation, the retailer must focus on reestablishing itself as a “white hat” by cooperating with rules laid out by search engines and third parties trusted by consumers could be used to closely monitor the procedures for consumers sake.