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As I talked about in today's column over on Porn Resource all the news this weekend ... in some circles at least ... has been the discovery by the New York Times of a massive linking scam to put J C Penney at the top of the search results for a wide range of important terms.

Of course, the New York Times didn't really uncover this story. When it comes to anything related to search engine rankings most people ... including journalists on such august papers as the New York Times ... wouldn't know their ass from their elbow.

They wouldn't recognize a linking scam if it jumped up and bit off their nose so, while J C Penney and their search engine optimisation company were certainly outed in public by the New York Times someone with some experience in the industry had to have given the story to the journalist in the first place.

And let's face it, the search engine optimisation business ... and webmasters in general ... are a bunch of whiney little bitches so it's not surprising that someone decided that it was time to get J C Penney slapped down.

Of course getting J C Penney kicked into search engine oblivion wasn't all that hard to do either. There's no doubt that they ... and their search engine optimisation providers ... had taken the decision to work outside of Google's guidelines and there's no doubt that Google does not like to be embarrassed.

So it's pretty easy to get the result you want when you can show the world that Google's algorithm isn't worth a pinch of you-know-what when it comes to preventing search engine spam. Of course Google is going to react by slicing and dicing anyone spamming its search results when they get publicly embarrassed. All someone has to do is bring the spammer and Google together and shit happens.

So someone stuck the knife into Google and got the result they wanted ... who that person might be we may never know ... but there's a valuable lessons to be learned here.

Never trust anyone
Obviously Google isn't as good at catching search engine spammers as it would like you to believe. At the very minimum J C Penney got away with it for months and possibly a whole lot longer so if you're tempted to drift over to the dark side and try a little search engine spamming of your own then by all means do so ... just don't ever tell anyone about it.

Obviously when you succeed in something that's very important to you the first thing you want to do is tell someone ... hell, tell everyone ... about what you have done; that's only natural. But if you really want succeed the very last thing you should do is open your mouth and spill your guts.

Sure, you can talk about it after you've made your money and moved on but don't talk about what you've done while it's still fresh and bringing in lots of nice cash. Don't even talk about it to your friends because ...

Well because you don't really know who your friends are do you?

If you've just uncovered a great way to spam the search engines and make money your friends are also going to want to try it and they're going to want to tell their friends about it too and before long the whole world knows about it. Even if you manage to restrict it to just a few people it won't be long before one of your competitors hears about it.

Now they may be working in the same vertical you are and they may be working on a different way to spam the search engines to get the rankings they want. Perhaps all they need to do is get rid of the websites that are ranking above them ... those spammy websites that you have been building and ranking with ... those websites that are making you money.

Now other people might have been just about tearing their hair out trying to outrank your sites with no success but suddenly ... because you talked to your friends ... they can see how you did it and if it was done using black hat methods then they can get rid of you by outing you to Google.

And sometimes you don't have to worry about who your friends talk to because it's not some faceless third person who is going to out you ... sometimes it can be the people that you think of as friends who are really your enemies.

This is a highly competitive industry and friendship can mean very little when there's money to be made. So before you open your mouth and tell even just one person what you did to achieve your ranking successes stop and think about what puts food on your table.

Maybe then you will realize that in this business the difference between friends and enemies is a very fine line and one that your competitors will cross it and shaft you in the blink of an eye.