The NY Eyeglasses Merchant Backlash: "Bad Merchant" Rankings Later This Year
Had a bad experience purchasing from an online merchant? Google says it wants to protect searchers from that, and it may crackdown later this year with changes intended to prevent bad merchants from ranking well.
The Semantic Problem
When The NY Eyeglasses website showed up a weakness in Google's algoritm, that Google can't tell the difference between good and bad rankings, they moved to crush HIM.
The Problem Remained.
If you missed the story a brazen website in NYC was horrible at customer service on purpose. They wanted the rants against them since those rants on review websites helped push their SEO rankings through the roof. They would achieve top rankings when the juice-rich bad reviews poured in.
The eyeglasses website found a seam in Google's lack of semantic understanding. A link, in the current Google world, is valuable no matter what the semantic context. Google landed on this fool like a ton of bricks by chaging their algorithm FOR HIS WEBSITE proving when you mess with the bull don't talk about it in the New York Times.
Google may close this loophole later this year as Navneet Panda's amazing algorithm begins to UNDERSTAND the difference between good and bank links or the sentiment behind them.
Merchants with bad reviews beware.
