Bad Customer Service For Rankings

December 2nd, 2010 // 1:20 pm @ Fox

There are always people who will find ways to exploit Google and rankings. The latest to gain publicity internationally is the case of a website – DecorMyEyes.com – whose owner realised that bad feedback and negative comments were leading to his site being ranked higher than when it had good feedback.

Let’s look at why that is.

If you are happy with a company or service, you may post a complimentary comment on a blog or share the experience with your friends. However, if you have had a terrible customer experience, you will post a negative comment, tell your friends, try to warn others, go to Consumer Affairs and so on. More links, comments and posts will result from a bad experience than a good one. In Google speak, this amounts to a higher ranking.

The germ who owns DecorMyEyes.com made a career from diddling customers out of their goods, overcharging them, abusing them, and harassing them. This behaviour was good for business as people posted their bad experience everywhere, resulting in the site ranking in the top spots for many top brand names.

The full story can be found on The New York Times and is titled A Bully finds a Pulpit on the Web (free registration required).

Interestingly, the New York Times article appeared on the 26th November, and four days later, Google has posted a response on their official blog. Being bad to your customers is bad for business where they state how horrified they were to hear of this story. Google has released an algorithmic solution to this issue and claim that Google users are now getting a better experience as a result. In typical Google fashion, it is a little vague exactly what the solution is.

Presumably there are a number of attributes examined to determine a user’s ‘good experience’ from a ‘bad experience’. I hope that one bad review or comment will not decrease a site’s ranking. The best of companies can have a bad review or comment and it is not necessarily of their making.

Time will tell. No doubt there will further exploitation once the algorithm change is more apparent.

Category : SEO