Here is something a lot of people don’t know about big brands:
They spend millions on marketing teams, contract the best consultants, and have every resource imaginable…
And yet still make $200 MILLION MISTAKES!
Take Google, for example.
They had to penalise their own Chrome browser because a sponsored post campaign violated their guidelines around paid links! 😂
That’s not all…
Some of these fails cost companies serious money:
- JC Penney got caught red-handed in a black hat link scheme.
- BMW‘s entire domain was deindexed after a major keyword stuffing incident.
- Overstock.com lost millions in organic revenue after its “creative” link strategy backfired.
- eBay‘s penalty cost them an estimated $200 million in sales volume.
Bottom line:
These weren’t simple “mistakes”.
These companies tried to manipulate Google and got punished – Just like the rest of us would.
In this post, I will show you 11 of the funniest SEO fails ever to happen.
More importantly, I explain exactly what they did wrong so you can avoid the same fate.
What Will I Learn?
The SEO disasters you’re about to read show that no company is too big to fail when it comes to Google’s guidelines.
The algorithm is impartial and does what it must to protect the SERPs.
The best thing we can do is learn from their mistakes while also having a bit of a laugh along the way.
This one shocked the online retail world and made the front page of all the SEO news publications – even getting featured in mainstream media.
Back in 2011, JCPenney got caught in a HUGE black hat link scheme.
The company was desperate to drive holiday sales during a tough economic period.
Their solution?
Rank as many product pages as they could on Google and take advantage of customers actively searching for products they offered.
But the big problem here was time…
JCPenney needed to rank fast to catch the holiday sales rush.
So, they paid to place thousands of backlinks from unrelated sites using exact match anchor text.
Their goal was to rank for competitive terms like:
The New York Times investigation found that JCPenney had acquired thousands of links from obscure sites like insurance, cars, and even casino sites in a very short time.
Most sites had very little relevance to JCPenney’s products.
This aggressive campaign helped them dominate the top spots for almost all their product categories.
But it didn’t last…
Google discovered JCPenney’s link scheme and handed out a brutal, public manual penalty.
Overnight, their rankings plummeted.📉
The average product page dropped from the #1 position (page 1) to page 6.
In one example, JCPenney ranked first for “living room furniture.” 2 hours later, it had dropped to position 68.
JCPenney lost millions of visitors within a few hours and potentially tens of millions in revenue over the coming months.
Google’s justice was swift and brutal.
But that’s not all…
The New York Times’s exposure turned this into a PR nightmare for JCPenney. They published a deep investigation and featured it on the home page.
It was (and still is) one of the biggest and funniest SEO fails from a major brand.
⭐ Key Lessons
Here are some of the key lessons:
- Never buy low-quality links – Google’s algorithms easily detect low-quality links and have zero tolerance for trying to manipulate their search algorithm.
- Build links on relevant sites – Our Link Building Lessons study showed that Google’s algorithm can understand and measure the relevance of any backlink to your site.
- Diversify your anchor text profile – Google looks at anchor text to decide whether the link is natural. You must have a natural-looking, diversified anchor text profile.
While black hat SEO techniques might work temporarily, Google will eventually uncover your work. And when they do, there is no mercy.
This is one of the most well-known SEO fails ever.
Google essentially nuked BMW‘s entire website with one of the toughest penalties a brand can ever receive.
BMW was caught using doorway pages in 2006 to trick Google’s Search algorithm.
Here is how it worked:
The German car company created special pages with the word “ebrauchtwagen” (used car) repeated within the content over 40 times.
These pages were explicitly designed for Googlebot so that the algorithm ranked them higher in the search results.
When someone clicked on the page, it would automatically redirect to BMW’s actual website.
Classic, right?
The redirected pages were optimised for conversions and often only included the word “used car” twice.
It’s a textbook bait-and-switch tactic that essentially showed one thing to search engines and another to humans.
Like all black hat SEO strategies, BMW got some initial results before being absolutely destroyed by Google.
Google didn’t just demote BMW’s rankings…
They removed BMW’s ENTIRE WEBSITE from the search engine results pages.
Matt Cutts (then head of Google’s webspam team) publicly announced that BMW was getting the “Google death penalty.”
Even worse, Google reset BMW’s page rank to zero, effectively forcing them to start from zero when the penalty was finally removed.
It was such an extreme punishment that the only way to access BMW’s site was by typing their domain into the address bar.
Not only was it a huge embarrassment, but they lost out on millions of site visitors around the world and potentially millions of dollars in revenue.
⭐ Key Lessons
Avoid being punished like BMW:
- Don’t use doorway pages – You must show the same content to search engines and users. Cloaking content is a direct violation of Google’s guidelines.
- Stay away from keyword stuffing – In today’s age of modern search engines, keyword stuffing doesn’t work and will only ever land you in hot water with Google.
- Optimise pages correctly – Follow Google’s guidelines and optimise your pages using SEO best practices.
BMW’s fail is a warning that Google is deadly serious about dodgy SEO techniques and will publicly embarrass even a major brand to protect the SERPs.
This household brand name made an SEO rookie mistake, which cost them dearly.
Home Depot sent a letter to its network of 2,000 service providers back in 2012.
The letter asked providers to add links from their websites to Home Depot’s installation service pages.
They gave partners and suppliers specific instructions to use keywords as anchor text to boost Home Depot’s rankings.
The letter also suggested that the links “do not have to be visually indicated,” implying that hidden links were acceptable.
Big mistake!
And for the cherry on top…
Home Depot’s letter also claimed that linking to Home Depot would help their own sites rank better – Not exactly a true statement.
Google found out about the letter after it was discussed in the Search Engine Watch forums and reported on by Bill Hartzer.
You can read the original letter here.
Google quickly picked up on the situation, and Home Depot raced to remove all the links from partners’ websites.
They also issued a public apology, admitting that the letter was a mistake.
While there was no evidence of a manual penalty, this was an extremely embarrassing moment for Home Depot.
Why?
Short answer – They lied.
Google called them out for essentially lying to their partners by claiming that a link to the Home Depot’s site would boost their own SEO.
It damaged the reputation of Home Depot with thousands of key suppliers.
The irony is that this could have been a very different story if Home Depot had been more strategic with their approach and not made false claims.
⭐ Key Lessons
Greed gets you nowhere in SEO!
These are some of the key learnings Home Depot has given us:
- Maintain a natural anchor text profile – Avoid over-optimising anchor text when building links, and ensure it looks completely natural to Google. Follow this tutorial.
- Don’t pressure your partners – Telling other site owners where and how to place links is considered a link scheme in Google’s eyes.
- Don’t lie – Focus on authentic relationships, and don’t bend the truth to get what you want.
Google warns against excessive link schemes. When building links, it’s essential that they look completely natural to humans and Googlebot.
What Overstock thought was a clever discount scheme ended up backfiring spectacularly.
Oversctock.com launched what they thought would be the easiest way to acquire tons of valuable edu backlinks at scale.
How did it work?
In 2011, they contacted hundreds of educational institutions and universities offering exclusive 10% discounts for faculty and students.
But there was a catch:
To qualify for the discounts, universities had to place links back to OVerstocks’s website from their edu domains.
They also had to use very specific anchor text like “bunk beds” or “gift baskets.”
We all know that edu backlinks carry a lot of authority in SEO!
And it worked…
Overstock acquired hundreds of powerful edu links in a matter of weeks.
They shot to the top of the search results, ranking in the top 5 for nearly all of their target keywords.
The truth is that no site gets that many edu links in such a short period of time.
The Overstock discount link campaign got the attention of the Wall Street Journal after a competitor complained about the top.
This tipped off Google, who responded quickly.
That slapped Overstock with a manual penalty, which caused their rankings to drop by an average of 60 places. 📉
But that wasn’t even the worst of it…
Overstock took a few months to remove the manual penalty and recover after removing all the edu links.
It’s estimated that Overstock’s sales dropped about 5% after the penalty, showing how SEO mistakes can have real consequences.
⭐ Key Lessons
These are some of the takeaways from Overstock’s SEO fail:
- Exchanging is considered payment – Google looks at paying for links in terms of providing anything of value. Overstock was essentially buying links by giving the discount.
- Be careful with unnatural links – Edu links are hard to come by, and Overstock’s competitors easily caught on to what was happening.
This case is a perfect example of how you will always get caught if you use a mass link building scheme.
This flower delivery giant learned a harsh SEO lesson about using paid content to increase Valentine’s Day sales.
Interflora is a large UK-based flower delivery company.
In 2013, they launched an aggressive link building campaign using advertorials.
The strategy was to pay tons of regional newspapers and outlets across the UK for sponsored articles with dofolow links back to their site.
Simple, right?
It wasn’t the most subtle move on Interflora’s part…
Within a couple of weeks, dozens of news sites suddenly published similar content containing a link with very similar anchor text.
There was almost no variation.
Here’s the important part:
Interflora timed this campaign about 2 months before Valentine’s – their biggest sales period of the year.
And like all of these funny SEO fails…It worked!
At least initially. Interflora secured higher rankings for the most competitive, commercial flower-related keywords.
They were set to make millions!
Literally just a few days before Valentine’s Day…
Google’s algorithm flagged the mass link acquisition, and Interflora was handed a devastating manual penalty.
They suffered severe demotions for both:
Some reports claim that Interflora didn’t even rank for their own brand name for a short period.
And it wasn’t just them that suffered…
Some of the newspapers that provided the paid links also got penalties from Google. But no one was hit as hard at Interflora, potentially costing them millions in revenue during their peak season.
⭐ Key Lessons
These are the lessons:
- Clearly disclose sponsored content – If you add sponsored content to your site, make sure you disclose it and add the right link attributes.
- Add Nofollow links when it’s obvious – Most people don’t realise how Google’s algorithm works. If it’s obvious that someone paid for a link, add a nofollow tag.
- Build links slowly – Buying links is against Google guidelines. If you do it, you must have a good quality control process and only place them on relevant sites.
This case is a good example of how bad link building can cut both ways. Interflora and some of the news sites were punished for buying and providing paid links.
Even web browsers can sabotage their own SEO with what seems like an “innocent test.”
But the big reason this is one of the funniest SEO fails ever is because Google is the default search engine on Mozilla’s web browser.
All good marketers know that the answer to every marketing question is:
“Test it”.
So, that’s what Mozilla decided to do in 2014 when they ran an experiment to see if they could increase the click-through rates from the Google search results.
The Mozilla SEO team implemented a large-scale test by changing all of the meta-descriptions for each Firefox support page at once.
The goal was actually really simple…
Improve the descriptions to generate more clicks.
Nothing wrong with that, right?
Except there was.
One rule in testing is to start small, scale success. Something Mozilla won’t forget for a long time.
It’s important to note that Mozilla didn’t break any major SEO rules or Google guidelines.
But the amount of changes they made to their site in such a short period caused the problems.
Mozilla experienced ranking drops and a loss of search traffic within about a week of changing the meta descriptions. 📉
They quickly undid and reverted their changes to recover, but the damage was done. It took months to properly gain their rankings back.
⭐ Key Lesson
What happened to Mozilla is more common than you think.
The good news is you can learn from their mistakes:
- Test first, scale later – SEO tests are a great way to improve your traffic. But start with small adjustments, and once you see success, you can scale the strategy.
- Monitor metrics closely – After making adjustments, pay close attention to key metrics that tell you if the changes have a positive or negative effect.
- Document and analyse experiments – Most SEOs are so excited to launch a new test but never go back to analyse the results.
The big lesson to learn here is to approach SEO experiments slowly and methodically. Have a plan in place, make small adjustments and then make bigger changes only after you see positive results.
Think major news sites are untouchable?
Think again! This SEO fail shows that Google will take drastic action for any site with unnatural links.
The BBC is one of the most well-respected news sites globally.
In 2013, they received an “unnatural links” warning from Google in Webmaster Tools (now Google Search Console).
It was made public after a BBC staff member posted in the Google Webmaster Help Forums asking for help.
Why did they get flagged?
Initially, it wasn’t clear which part of the site was affected. Some SEO experts speculated it might be related to how RSS scrapers abuse BBC content.
It prompted the BBC to audit their site and content.
The big problem here for the BBC is that they have a lot of content, often written by independent journalists in hundreds of niche categories.
The fear was that the BBC could have some serious sitewide issues!
Was BBC penalised?
Yes, but it turned out that only one particular article was affected.
Google’s John Mueller later clarified the situation, saying that the Google algorithm had found only one unnatural link in a particular article.
It was a relatively easy fix. And the BBC, although a little embarrassed, got away relatively unscathed.
⭐ Key Lessons
There is one big lesson here…
Even if you have no intention of breaking Google’s guidelines, you can still get into trouble.
It highlights that you must have strong editorial principles and regularly audit your site. If you have a team of writers, you must take extra care.
WordPress was caught up in a messy doorway page incident. This was no small operation either…They deserved what they got!
In 2005, WordPress saw an opportunity to create a ton of content and rank for a lot of high-value, commercial keywords very quickly.
The goal?
Generate articles and optimise them to rank for profitable terms.
These pages provided almost zero value to users and existed purely to funnel traffic (and therefore revenue) straight into WordPress.
But here’s the worst part…
This wasn’t just a few pages. We are talking about 168,000 low-quality doorway pages with essentially junk content.
They contracted this out to an agency that used different levels of automation to create the content.
This massive manipulation couldn’t and didn’t go unnoticed by Google.
It’s safe to say this was a terrible idea from a company that should’ve known better.
Google didn’t hesitate to drop the hammer with severe consequences.
All of the spammy pages were deindexed entirely from the search results.
The WordPress.org domain was also penalised, losing its page rank score and even being unable to rank for its brand name for a couple of days.
For a platform of this size, this was potentially a loss of thousands of visitors and a PR nightmare for a company that boasts an SEO-friendly platform.
The main penalty lasted just 2 days.
But it took months for WordPress to make a full recovery damaging their reputation as a provider at a time when they were trying to grow their brand.
⭐ Key Lessons
These are my key lessons:
- Quality over quantity – Quality is always going to trump quantity. Even in today’s AI content world, it’s so crucial that you only publish high-quality content.
- Focus on users first – Google has said it thousands of times – Create content for users, not search engines. Once you have great content on the page, then you can optimise it for search.
- Run regular content audits – Content quality is more important today than it has ever been. Make sure you audit your content regularly and remove low-quality pages.
Even back in 2005, WordPress should have known this would be a massive disaster. And they paid a hefty price for their mistake.
While this fail was never officially confirmed, the results and impact tell the whole story.
eBay suddenly suffered a massive organic traffic loss in May 2014.
It’s estimated that eBay lost up to 50% of its organic visibility overnight.
While Google never confirmed the penalty, most SEO experts agree they were penalised because of the sharp drop in traffic.
And that’s not all…
SEO’s pointed to the fact that eBay had been using questionable tactics:
eBay was essentially relying on its domain authority to rank low-quality pages that didn’t provide any real value to its users.
This is a known negative SEO tactic that Google clearly wouldn’t like.
The impact was devastating.
Based on all the known facts, this was very likely an algorithmic penalty.
It’s possible that Google handed them a manual action penalty, but in most cases, they would disclose this to the public for such a big brand.
The traffic lost was estimated to cost eBay $200 million in sales volume. This would be up to $20 million in revenue for the company. 💸💸
Ouch!
Their recovery took months, and eBay was forced to overhaul its content strategy completely.
eBay also spent a lot of time removing low-quality content from their site and making their pages valuable for users.
A lot of ecommerce companies and marketplaces rely on organic search for traffic. eBay is no different!
⭐ Key Lessons
Here are some of the big takeaways to keep in mind:
- Domain authority is not a license to cheat – While there is no doubt that domain authority plays a major role in SEO success, it does not mean you can use dodgy tactics and get away with it.
- Monitor your traffic daily – Traffic is the lifeblood of your site and business. Set up alerts so you’re notified if you get major traffic drops.
- Respond quickly – Have a plan of action if you have a sudden traffic drop. That might be as simple as contacting an SEO agency specialising in Google penalty recovery.
Don’t abuse the authority of your website. Content will always be king, and Google expects you to provide value and a quality user experience.
Okay, this has to be the funniest SEO fail ever:
It’s a story that we almost couldn’t believe was real.
Back in 2012, Google was pushing Chrome as the number 1 browser on the internet. And they were having a lot of success.
To advertise Chrome even more, Google paid a large number of bloggers and site owners to create videos talking about the benefits of the Chrome browser.
But as part of the deal, the publishers had to write a small post, embed the video directly into the content and include a link back to Chrome’s download page.
Did anyone else hear the words “paid link”?
The irony was that Google’s webspam team (led by Matt Cutts at the time) had just been dishing out manual penalties to other sites doing the exact same thing.
But even more embarrassing than that…
Google Search had just launched a major update in their algorithm targeting low-quality, undisclosed sponsored posts.
You can not overstate how ironic this entire situation was!
Google had no choice but to penalise its own browser.
The Chrome browser site was handed a manual penalty, which demoted its rankings in the search results for about 60 days.
At this moment, when you Googled “best web browsers”, Google Chrome was nowhere to be seen.
They had dominated the top spots for years!
What made this extra funny was that Google had to publicly admit to violating their own guidelines. 😂
Matt Cutts confirmed the penalty on Twitter, sending the SEO world into a spin!
⭐ Key Lessons
First, I have to say that I am amazed Google actually penalised the Chrome site. I’m honestly not sure if modern-day Google would.
But there are some lessons we can learn here:
- No site is above the rules – If Google punished themselves for their own violations, it’s clear that no brand is above the rules.
- Monitor your agencies carefully – Google blamed the marketing agency they contracted, which is a great lesson to keep an eye on your marketing agencies’ work.
- Always follow attribution rules – You can tag links with four different link attributes. Protect yourself, your site and your business by using them.
For me, this is one of the funniest SEO fails because it’s Google penalising Google. Doesn’t get much better than that, right?
This next fail is a great reminder of how small mistakes can cause major issues for your site.
In May 2020, Ryanair made a baffling change to their robots.txt file.
What did they do?
They blocked ALL search engines from accessing their site using a directive in their robots.txt file.
It was clearly a mistake, but it remained live for a full 12 days until a member of their team noticed.
If you didn’t know, your robots.txt file tells search engines which pages they can and can’t access.
Ryanair essentially put up a “DO NOT ENTER” sign on their website for all search engines.
In my opinion, Ryanair got incredibly lucky.
There was a slow and slight decline in organic traffic to their site. But no major or sudden drops like most people would’ve expected.
Why not?
Google doesn’t immediately kick pages out of its index when you adjust or change your robots.txt file.
The damage happens gradually as Google tries to crawl each page, and it gets stopped.
This story could’ve been very different if it had continued for a few more weeks or months.
It’s possible that Ryanair’s entire website would’ve been removed from the search results, costing millions.
⭐ Key Lessons
Here are my main lessons:
- Treat your Robots.txt file with care – All major search engines follow robots.txt directives, which means one small mistake could destroy your entire domain.
- Always double-check technical changes – Even small technical SEO changes can have major effects. If you’re stuck, it’s better to reach out to a professional who knows what they’re doing.
- Create a fail-safe – Monitor your indexing and crawling patterns regularly with tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs.
Even small, seemingly simple changes can have an effect on your SEO. This near-miss fail is the perfect example of why technical SEO requires constant attention.
There are a lot of major SEO mistakes in these stories from brands that really should know better.
I mean Google having to penalise their own browser?!
It doesn’t get much funnier than that.
But there is also a serious side to this with some big learning.
If you take anything away from these fails (other than the laughs), remember these 5 learnings:
- Stick To White-Hat SEO Strategies – Always focus on legitimate, proven SEO tactics that follow Google’s guidelines instead of trying to take shortcuts.
- Regularly Audit Your Site – Schedule monthly technical SEO audits to catch issues before they become penalties.
- Test All SEO Changes First – Before implementing sitewide changes, test them on a small section of your site to avoid disasters.
- Have Clear SEO Guidelines – Create detailed internal documentation for your team about what’s allowed and what’s not when building links, creating content, or making technical changes.
- Focus On Providing Value – At the end of the day, Google rewards sites that genuinely help users, not those trying to game the system.
That last point is especially important…
Every company above forgot who they were creating content for. This led them down the path of doing something dodgy and eventually being punished for it.
Remember that at the core of SEO, you are trying to provide value and connect with your users.
Doing a good job of that makes the rest of your SEO strategy much easier to execute.
Simple as that!
There you have it…
11 of the funniest SEO fails from major companies who should know better!
The bottom line is that no one is too big to fail when it comes to Google’s SEO guidelines.
As I like to say:
“The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
And that is exactly what happened with these brands!
Don’t get caught up in cheap SEO tactics or using black hat SEO techniques that will land you in hot water with Google.
History shows us that while these strategies might work initially, Google will eventually catch up.
The short-term gains are just not worth the risk.
What was your favourite fail on this list?
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