On the surface, it was a great idea. A Brooklyn eyewear merchant would treat customers horribly, stealing from them, sending late shipments, and doing other bad business practices in a concerted effort to gain attention. The more people complained about the business on customer service forums, the more Google’s ranking of the business increased. That, in turn, lead to more business. Negative reviews were boosting website rankings. However, Google has changed its algorithm to have negative reviews harm a business’s ranking, rather than boost it in an effort to control attempts to game the system.
“Being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results,” said Google spokesman Amil Singhal in a post on Google’s blog. “We can’t say for sure that no one will ever find a loophole in our ranking algorithms in the future. We know that people will keep trying: attempts to game Google’s ranking … go on 24 hours a day, every single day.”
While that’s great that they’ve changed things around now, it’s a little too late for people who got sucked into a horrible business transaction with unscrupulous people, isn’t it? Still, better late than never, I suppose.
Tags: Google, Google evil, Google punishes bad business practices, negative traffic punishes websites, Amit Singhal, Google blog, Google algorithm, Google search results, search engine abuse, Google punishes business for negative traffic, spam, unusual business plans, being bad is bad for business