Last week’s New York Times’ article took the example of well referenced and indexed website with very poor customer satisfaction. In a nutshell, the article said that one can generate a lot of bad reviews and unhappy customers that translate in many unique outbound links (links pointing to your website), which will result in greatly improved ranking on the natural result page.
It took less than a week for Google to counter act such scenario in the future. The modified the indexation algorithms and it was implemented immediately.
Google will now gather online retailers customer reviews from the internet, Google Checkout system, Google Product Search, and other sources. Google will now use the reviews as part of its ranking algorithm.
Google says, “in the last few days 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. The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result.”
Google finally adds: “We can say with reasonable confidence that being bad to customers is bad for business on Google. And we will continue to work hard towards a better search.”
What does this mean?
It means Google will now account for customers’ satisfaction in its ranking algorithm.
How?
No one is sure as off yet as Google states that they will not use ‘sentiment analysis’ to indicate whether a link is good or bad for an online retailer.
But don’t go thinking that your online shop will rank better on SERP by generating a lot of good or equally bad reviews.
So treat you customers well and Google will rank you well!
Christophe Bernigaud
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