Google Changes Search Algorithm To Penalize Bad Marketers
By Anna Johnson on December 2nd, 2010Google has changed its search engine algorithm to penalize Internet marketers and companies that try to get higher search rankings by attracting complaints and negative reviews – and therefore links – as a result of providing poor customer service or engaging in other bad business practices.
Google has changed its search engine algorithm to penalize Internet marketers and companies that try to get higher search rankings by attracting complaints and negative reviews – and therefore links – as a result of providing poor customer service or engaging in other bad business practices.
Google was prompted to change its search engine algorithm after a recent article in The New York Times drew attention to a company that bragged about how its poor customer service generated a lot of online complaints, which in turn brought it a lot of back-links and higher Google search engine rankings.
After investigating several possible solutions to preventing Internet marketers from capitalizing on bad behavior, Google settled on an algorithmic solution. According to Google Fellow, Amit Singhal Google’s new algorithm detects and downgrades “merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience.”
Singhal admits that it may still be possible for someone to find a loophole in Google’s search engine algorithm. Consequently – and in accordance with the company’s long-standing practice of keeping its search engine algorithm secret – Google won’t reveal the “underlying signals, data sources, and how we combined them to improve our rankings.”
Google is, however, fairly confident that the new algorithm will penalize bad marketers.
That’s good news for both the competitors of bad companies and their customers. Meanwhile, it’s not clear whether the new algorithm will also address other problems associated with giving high search rankings to undeserving webpages and websites.
For instance, will Google’s new algorithm address the problem of giving high rankings to excessively and unjustly negative reviews or articles about companies or individuals? Or will Google address this problem separately… or not at all… unless there’s a New York Times article about it?
We will just have to wait and see…
