Stay quiet and still, and maybe the storm will blow over. That appears to be J.C. Penney's PR approach to some recent bad press it received.

On Sunday, a 3,000-word story dropped in The New York Times about the department store’s questionable ability to rank No. 1 on a plethora of Google searches. The article was widely circulated on Twitter, and it was the most e-mailed story on NYTimes.com.

You can read the full story here.

The story, by reporter David Segal, is based around this fact: During the holidays, Google searches for terms like “dresses,” “bedding,” “area rugs,” “skinny jeans,” “home décor,” “grommet top curtains,” and much more, resulted in J.C. Penney as the No. 1 result. The department store beat millions of other websites for the top spot each time.

The Times thought this was awfully peculiar, so it reached out to an online search expert, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media of New York. He told the Times that this scheme to essentially game Google searches was the “most ambitious attempt” he’d ever heard of.

How did Penney’s—or someone—pull this off? According to the Times, more than 2,000 websites—most of them unrelated to clothing—link to Penney’s site, which is among the top ways Google algorithms decide a website’s rank in a search. The more websites that link to a site, the more credibility it has, the higher it will appear in a search.

Someone was paying these sites to link to Penney's website.
 
How did Penney's PR department respond? It denied any wrongdoing, but promised to fix the problem.

“J.C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links that you sent to us, as it is against our natural search policies,” Darcie Brossart, a spokesperson for the department store, wrote in an e-mail to the Times. “We are working to have the links taken down.”

A look at the store's Twitter feed and Facebook page reveal that its social media properties are staying mum on the issue, and commenters on its Facebook page were not talking about the story. While the story received plenty of retweets, none of the sentiment seemed overly negative towards J.C. Penney.

Meanwhile, the department store has fired its search engine consulting firm, SearchDex, according to the Times. Google told the Times that it was taking “corrective action” against the department store, which means it is burying Penney's search results on Google.  

This story will continue to reverberate through the media and blogs this week. One can assume that the Google demotion will hurt the company’s bottom line, but will the negative story spark a PR disaster for Penney? It seems the company's denial and decision to remain silent on social media has so far prevented it from becoming a viral menace.

Read the full story.