If the big guys screw up, does that create an advantage for smaller, independent businesses?

That’s probably a question worth asking after The New York Times took aim at J.C. Penney last weekend in “The Dirty Secrets of Search.” The piece certainly has people talking and thinking about the dark side of search optimization, even if they cannot quite grasp all the details. In the article by David Segal, the Times hires expert Doug Pierce of Blue Mountain Media to study why the department store chain kept finishing first in searches.

A complex case nets attention

The results are sometimes complex. In the end, though, writer David Segal puts it this way when it comes to Pierce’s findings: “What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of ‘black hat’ optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.”

There’s not exactly what one would call a smoking gun. But there is, as David Segal says, plenty of intrigue. Google has rules for searching, and some smart people  are looking—and, evidently, finding—ways around the guidelines. The campaign for J.C. Penney has meant that the store comes up first in the non-advertising responses to Google searches for a wide range of products. Doug Pierce, the expert, “described the optimization as the most ambitious attempt to game Google’s search results that he has ever seen,” according to the Times.

So whodunit? At J.C. Penney, the answer is: Not us. At least according to the same Times piece—and the comments that came after its publication. Darcie Brossart told the Times in an email included in the big story: “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. We are working to have the links taken down.”

At PCMag.com, writer Sara Yin also quotes Brossart in a piece titled, “J.C. Penney Fires Back at Google and New York Times Over SEO Controversy.” At PCMag.com, Brossart called the characterization of J.C. Penney “misleading and unwarranted.” For her part, Sara Yin does a great job of outlining what went wrong. She writes that J.C. Penney’s now-terminated search engine optimization firm “apparently created artificial websites that linked to J.C. Penney’s site. The links helped push J.C. Penney pages to the top of Google search results; one known aspect behind Google’s top-secret page-ranking algorithm is that the more times your website is linked, the higher up you rank in a search result.”

Web: more than a corporate plaything

With the big guys debating how to regulate the search process, maybe there’s more an opening for the rest of us. The sense of the web being too often a corporate plaything could wind up adding credibility—and even traffic—to sites representing smaller, independent businesses. At least there’s a fresh opening for new faces and a climate in which some of the larger entities are under scrutiny. Could this be the breakthrough moment for small business and solo entrepreneurs?

Certainly bloggers and computer experts are already trying to learn from the J.C. Penney piece. The Long View columnist Richi Jennings has a don’t-let-it-happen-to-you take on all this, reminding us all that companies are responsible for keeping track of their links, whether they are “white hat” or “black hat” personalities. Richi Jennings says the key question becomes: “How can IT (information technology) people help protect their marketing department from making a similar mistake?”

That’s a question that more and more web site managers will be asking themselves in the weeks ahead. The rest of us will be thinking about our own internet marketing strategies, especially our approach to getting good search results. Our question to you: Do you think that this moment could lead to a positive new era for small businesses and solo entrepreneurs?