Play Nice With Customers or GOOG Will Get You
No doubt you may have read about how some jerk used his bad reputation to rank better in Google and rip people off. Today Google announced that they have tweaked their algorithm to demote businesses that have bad reputations. And I quote:
we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience.
It used to be that site owners were worried about their competitors pointing spammy links at their site in an attempt to get Google to penalize them. Now instead of linking it looks like all you have to do is go on a few sites and say your competitor’s service sucks.
According to Google:
We can’t say for sure that no one will ever find a loophole in our ranking algorithms in the future.
Now I am no fan of chopping the competition down to build myself up, but I am thinking that if GOOG can demote because of bad customer service signals, it may also be able to promote businesses that have good customer service signals.
Gentlemen, start your signaling.