One of the New York Times' most e-mailed articles today is The Dirty Little Secrets of Search. JC Penney (JCP) had been showing up for several search results, due to thousands of back links to its site.

Of course, JCP denies knowledge of any black-hat search engine optimization techniques. What's amazing to me is how long they got away with this before Google was aware of it. The good news is Google adjusted the organic results for them rather quickly.

This begs the question - is black hat SEO worth it? It seems like it worked for JCP for the last holiday season. Yet, we don't know the bounce rates from their site. They may have generated traffic, but they may not have converted to leads.

I've seen many campaigns that drive traffic to a site, but fail to convert to sales and/or leads.

Google's goal is relevance. Relevance is what consumers are looking for.

At the end of the day, an increase in unique visitors to a site is nice, but more sales and/or leads is always better.