Bloody hellfire. I just finished reading this article from the New York Times. This guy found a way to make unhappy customers unwittingly boost his SEO...
NYT - A Bully Finds A Pulpit On The Web
Because all of his upset (and in some cases, terrified) customers post on consumer websites about their awful experiences, his site looks more 'popular' to Google. If people search for the company name, then they'll see all the bad-experience stories. But if people are searching for brand names of the products he sells, his site is the 'most popular', most linked to and most talked about site that carries that brand, and as such his page shows at the top of the Google results (in some cases above the site of the actual brand itself).
Looks like you can take SEO too far after all...
What an amazing story. Ok it's not good for the poor old consumers that were affected, but it highlights issues with current online trading, and reinforces the slow shift from the early internet frontier mentality to a hopefully more professional marketplace. Looks like we have quite a bit further to go though  Some interesting things on the SEO front. So a link is a link, regardless of why its there. So a hundred links about widget.com on various consumer sites all complaining about you, are still links, if they point back to widget.com! Great quote from the article, "sentiment analysis" How do you decide if a source link is a good one or not? "A crucial factor in Google search results, the (google) spokesman explained, is the number of links from respected and substantial Web sites. The more links that a site has from big and well-regarded sites, the better its chances of turning up high in a search" And consumer websites rank very highly in google, regardless what people are saying about you. The site owner that causes all the fuss is quite unsympathetic: ...He stumbled upon the upside of rudeness by accident.
The weirdest thing was that reading it, although I think it's despicable to take it to a level of personal threats, the guy has a point. People are much quicker to share complaints than they are to share adequate or positive experiences. If it wasn't for the ****hole Factor, it could be considered a fair manipulation of the human tendency to complain. I mean if I was being entirely fair, then almost every weekday at about noon I would tweet or blog "yay! the Royal Mail have successfully delivered my mail, including some stuff that I know was only posted yesterday!" but I don't and nor do most other people, especially when it's bills and statements and advertising. We talk about it only when they lose stuff. VirtuallyMary
I remember hearing about this a little while ago. Very interesting article, and kind of tempts me to ask for bad reviews if any! Completely agree with Virtual Mary on the bad feeback front, it's amazing how people want to be heard when complaining..yet when giving people some credit, it seems unnecessary. I wonder how long it will be before a few more people are getting lucky off this kind of thing. DynaShop
Well doesnt look good for his company as probably everyone knows where he is and who he is.... websites are no good if you are in jail.... |
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