3 December 2010 - Earlier this week, the New York Times brought into limelight how a merchant with bad reviews nonetheless was ranking well in Google. It has been found many website owners try to manipulate the search engine algorithms to achieve better ranking. They adopt negative advertisement as a strategy to improve their rankings on search engines. It gets them more replies which results in more hits, more sales and more business.

In order to prevent the merchants providing an extremely poor user experience to rank well in the search engine, Google incorporated merchant reviews as a part of its ranking system. The reviews about merchants are aggregated through Google’s own Checkout system and also from across the web. With Google Product Search, merchants have an overall reviews page.

Reviews- A part of Google Algorithms or Not

Although Google has announced that merchant reviews will now be a part of its ranking system; it never says explicitly that reviews will be a part of its ranking algorithm.

Google’s blog 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.”

And when asked whether the reviews are being used, Google’s reply was- “….we cannot reveal the details of our solution—the underlying signals, data sources, and how we combined them to improve our rankings….”

No doubt, it would be better for the merchants if Google would confirm whether reviews will be a part of its ranking algorithm. Yet the merchants need to worry too much about it as reviews would just another factor to be considered for website ranking; it will not override all other ranking algorithms. It is a red alert only for the web sellers adopting Black Hat SEO strategies to improve their search engine rankings.

Written by SynapseInteractive Copywriting Team.