It's a bit late or a bit early depending on which way you look at it, for a spring clean but that's what Google have had.
Yesterday they announced that it had changed the way its ranks search results so that unscrupulous merchants would find it harder to appear prominently in searches.
The change was prompted by an article in The New York Times on Sunday about Vitaly Borker, (this is not a joke, I promise) a Brooklyn-based online seller of eyeglasses. Mr. Borker claimed that he purposely shouted at and frightened some of the customers at his site, DecorMyEyes.com because the online complaints actually worked in his favour in Google search results.
He claimed, "Google's search engine is unable to tell the difference between positive posts and withering online critiques. Therefore, the more complaints posted about Mr. Borker's site, the more likely customers would be to find his store ranked high on a Google search, which yielded him more revenue."
Google then hit back with a blog titled "Being bad to your customers is bad for your business," They said that it had changed its service in order to detect Mr. Borker and "hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide extremely poor user experience."
Google did not reveal what changes it had made or how that change would affect online sellers as "the more it reveals about the changes it made, the easier it will be for unscrupulous sellers to game it."
Mr. Borker has already had a harder time pushing DecorMyEyes to its previous high rankings on Google. The store once showed up on the first page of a search of "Christian Audigier" and "eyeglasses." But post-changes, it was not in the first 20 pages.
Source: NYtimes
One thought on “Google Changes Method of Ranking”
Ha Ha. I’m sorry but that is funny.
It serves Mr Borker right. Found a loophole, exploited it; the loophole has now been fixed and now he’s up sh*t creek without a paddle :)
That said, type Paul Gannon into Google and my site comes top (or should do) :) Although, I have worked hard to get to the top, 10 years!
Happy Ranking Mr Borker.