It isn’t often that one individual or event sparks an industry giant to take almost immediate action, but that is exactly what has happened on 1st Dec 2010 as Google made an announcement on their blog.
Google has tweaked their algorithm to avoid bad reviews getting sellers site to rank well in the SERPS (search engine results pages). This comes after an article was published in The New York Times about a customer who had a terrible experience after ordering some contact lenses online, from what she assumed was a reputable website because it had first page rankings for the terms she searched for.
The owner of DecorMyEyes, Vitaly Borker, boasted about how negative reviews about the appalling service and products he provided (as well as the alleged threats he made to unhappy customers) were providing him with links to his site which helped him to achieve the first position in Google’s searches. He didn’t mind if reviews were bad or if people were posting all kinds of controversial things about his company, he just wanted the publicity. It brought to light a possible method to manipulate search engines in a high profile way (you can’t get much more high profile in the US than the NYT) so Google probably had to be seen to publically do something about it – even if the original claim by the website owner wasn’t wholly true in the first place. Was this really a way for anyone, no matter how unscrupulous, to succeed online – by being so bad that people unwittingly got them to the top of the rankings just by talking about them?
Surely this is something that should have been sorted out a long time ago so this couldn’t happen?
Google won’t say what algorithm change they have used to eliminate this from happening in the future of course, because the only way search engines can escape wide scale manipulation is to keep the details of their algorithm a secret. In their blog post, Google mentioned a few obvious ways to stop this kind of site from gaining from bad publicity by rising through the rankings – such as blocking the offender, using sentiment analysis and expose user reviews.
I think that none of the 3 ways would solve the problem outright, but might help. If Google blocked the offender, that would only work when they were aware of who was causing the problem. Reporting websites for things likes this is a double edged sword because it is also open to manipulation. A business owner reporting (incorrectly) their competitors for example, to try and get them blocked to gain more business for themselves.
Sentiment analysis wouldn’t work because most of the comments which linked back to the offending site would be on review site which usually nofollow the links as to not leak benefit to unworthy others. The 3rd option, which in my opinion would be the best, is to expose the reviews that users had left about the site. This method would hopefully deter users from purchasing items from the site but wouldn’t change the site in the search results.
There would be a few negatives to letting the reviews play a major part in the rankings. The main one being the practice of shouting down your competitors again. If a company’s rival was ranking higher than them, they could post bad reviews in the hope that their rivals would get demoted, or they could even falsify their own positive reviews to try and grab themselves a bigger piece of the pie.
Google claim that they have found a better algorithmic solution than the above so the long and the short of it is that we have to take their word for it. It is in Google’s best interests to provide users with the most useful, reliable and high quality search results after all – and our job as s to make sure that our dentists’ sites are the ones meeting those requirements.
