Blackhat SEO
J.C. Penny has enjoyed great rankings for many popular keywords for quite some time. Many of the keywords would make you think of other retailers, not just J.C. Penny. Thousands of keyword phrase links were placed by someone on websites across the web leading to the J.C. Penny website. These links then caused Google to rank the J.C. Penny website very high. Many of the sites were abandoned and were just used to promote these links. Building links to your website is a good thing and not against Google rules but the way it was done in this case was considered “Black Hat SEO” and Google does not like that. Now Google has removed the good rankings that J.C. Penny once enjoyed. J.C. Penny denies that they placed or paid someone to place the links.
Read more about it.. Click Here