Is This Really SEO?

CAN YOU IMAGINE!? See this amusingly real life story of DécorMyEyes.com. She tops in Google by bullying her customers.

GetSatisfaction.com, ComplaintsBoard.com and ConsumerAffairs.com are few of the many high ranking websites where people go to lay complaints.

This company will harass her customers so that they will complain at GetSatisfaction.com and sites like that. Their complaints sent backlinks back to them and consequently first spot on Google result.

They’ve been doing business like this for 2 years until now. They’ve been caught. The full story is in ‘The New York Times’ website http://nyti.ms/gsF1n8. But, the question is...

1) How on earth is it possible for a bully to get Google favor for years? and …
2) Any SEO lesson from all this?

 

You are not joking, right?

 

No. I'm not joking. It's there in 'The New York Times' http://nyti.ms/gsF1n8
A real life story.

 

Hmm... very interesting story. Thanks for the share!

 

The publisher of the website is very intelligent
what an idea!
"get more costumers by harassing costumers"!

 

This is the reason why Google has adjusted its algorithm after coming across this story, to attack this problem. Google has also added into their ranking algorithms to find out how merchants trade, based on their customer service and reviews online, and based on this they will rank results also.

 

It's less of SEO, but more of gaining traffic. It really is a marvel to think about, but of course this can hurt other sites. Not to mention bad customer experiences.

 

Wasim Ismail:

yea! i heard of the story too. Where Amit Singhal one of Google's representative talked about Google's sentiment analysis system and her quick response to the situation (http://bit.ly/fwQwND).

But out there, there are controversial opinion about the situation.

The question on most people's lips is if there is any sentiment analysis system. if it existed, how come it never discovered this company until the papers did?

Yet the ultimate question still remains, what are the lessons to learn from all these?

 

They used the technology to their advantage, is it possible technically to measure the sentiment of a content, well if google is true at what they said they can, then this type of activity is only going to get you backlinks but may not get counted, how will google do it, i assume they will discount the backlinks from review sites and complaint boards/portals, whether it is positive or negative it is going to get discounted i assume.

 

I'm not sure if it's SEO, but it is certainly bad publicity... and Big G will certainly catch on this sooner or later.

I imagine that these guys take the old adagio that it doesn't matter whether they speak well or bad about you, as long as they speak about you...

 

wow. that's something really unusual

 

Yes, I also have seen this article at Matt Cutts Buzz. This is called negative publicity. Sometimes this kind of hype works better than usual marketing. But harmful in long run.
Here is the Google’s reaction after publish this article http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-customers-is-bad-for.html

 

why would big G want to catch this?

 

With Google, any kind of publicity is good publicity.

 

I think Google is taking necessary steps to stop these kind of happenings. I have recently studied that Google is likely to consider online merchant reviews as ranking signals.

Here is the source: http://searchengineland.com/google-now-using-online-merchant-reviews-as-ranking-signal-57445

 

wow.....interesting. I think there's always a loophole to get to the first in SERP.

 

thanks for sharing

 

Because Big G prides itself of providing quality and valuable content to its users. It will not like that complaints from users will have the opposite effect of boosting the "bad" guys...

There are some signals already that this is going to happen. Tessa_86 points out for example a link where this is highlighted, and it's not the only one...