New York Times reporter David Segal broke a story about how J.C. Penny had managed to rise to the top of Google searches for just about anything they sell.
Within days, hours actually, of informing Google of these results, Penny's place in these searches dropped from #1 to #70 or so.
J.C. Penny, of course, denies having anything to do with the scheme to plant tens of thousands of links in link-farm sites, but they did fire their search optimization consultants.
What is interesting to me, though, is how Mr. Segal uses the word "illegal" when describing search optimization strategies that violate Google's policies.
As pervasive as they are, Google is a private company. They may make whatever policies they choose about their search algorithms. They may publish guidelines of things they consider to be acceptable and unacceptable ways to raise your results. And they may sanction transgressions in any way they choose, so long as those sanctions to not run afoul of real laws.
But nothing you do, or do not do, to manipulate your Google search results is "illegal." There are no laws against it - except perhaps undisclosed collusion as the E.U. regulators are alleging.
Google's policies, though, are not laws. They do not carry the force of law. Let's stop using the term "illegal" to describe things that other people simply do not like.
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