Bad Merchant? Google May Drop Your 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 news came during the “How to Rank Better in Google & Bing” session that I moderated yesterday at the SXSW conference in Austin. Google’s chief Web spam fighter Matt Cutts responded to concerns one merchant had about bad competitors outranking him.

Cutts said:

“We have a potential launch later this year, maybe a little bit sooner, looking at the quality of merchants and whether we can do a better job on that, because we don’t want low quality experience merchants to be ranking in the search results.”

Google’s Previous Crackdown

This isn’t the first time Google’s done a crackdown. In November 2010, the New York Times ran a big feature about a sunglasses merchant called Decor My Eyes, and how the owner Vitaly Borker was convinced that people complaining about him online helped him rank better. The exposure of his bad business practices later lead to Borker getting a four-year jail sentence.

Whether those bad reviews really did help Decor My Eyes do better is debatable, but for whatever reason, the site was doing well in Google at the time, despite having such bad reviews.

Google reacted with unprecedented speed, making a change within days that it said would penalize bad merchants. It never explained what factors were used to issue penalties, not even confirming if poor quality reviews had an impact.

Looking At Signals Beyond Bad Reviews?

Of course, if Google already has a system in place to penalize bad merchants, why are they apparently still ranking well, in some cases?

I’ll try to follow up further with Google about this, but one factor might be the continued growth in fake reviews. You can’t rely solely on reviews for assurance a business is really good.

That, of course, would mean that reviews were being used as part of the previous crackdown. Cutts seemed to confirm this when I asked, “if Google is already using review data, then what other signals would it turn to as part of a renewed effort.”

Cutts replied:

“We are trying to ask ourselves, are there other signals that we can use to spot whether someone is not a great merchant, and if we can find those, and we think that they are not all that spammable, then we’re more than happy to use those.”

Related Articles

• Google’s “Gold Standard” Search Results Take Big Hit In New York Times Story
• Google: Now Likely Using Online Merchant Reviews As Ranking Signal
• DecorMyEyes Merchant Vitaly Borker Sentenced To Four Years In Federal Prison
• Google Gets Into Ratings Game With Trusted Stores
• Google Product Search To Become Google Shopping, Use Pay-To-Play Model
• Marketers React To News Of Google Shopping Changing To Paid Inclusion With Hope & Concern
• Google Widens Test Of Affiliate Advertising In New Pay-For-Play Shopping
• Google Gives Update On Shopping Going Full Paid Inclusion, Hints At AdWords’ Future On Q3 Call
• Despite New Rules, Google Product Search Merchants Not Providing Accurate Tax & Shipping Costs
• Google’s Free Trusted Stores Seal Program Opens To All U.S. Merchants
• The Mess That Is Google Shopping

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.