Did Google Just Gave Us An Offensive Weapon?

[MKelly]

Paypal is still a PR6 and ranking number 3 for 'online payment' after all their bad reviews.

 

[ljt3759]

Google are doing a lot of stupid and unfair things recently.

 

[bfellow]

Paypal also has over 582,000 pages indexed and 266,000,000 backlinks. Negative reviews would hurt a small business, but a huge business like PayPal, not so much.

So purely theoretically you could combat negative reviews with what you know positively affects your rankings, like backlinks.

 

[bertbaby]

I read the article and it doesn't make sense. How can a Goggle algorithm make a determination if a review is good or bad? Count the number of nasty adjectives and weigh them accordingly? See how many times they show up in sites like "GetSatisfaction"? Stupid and potentially libelous.

 

[theoptimizer60]

this is a really stupid idea by google. Review wars anybody?

 

[Bross]

No, the most stupid thing they did was the autosearch feature.
I thought I just need to get used to it like everything new.
But No. It stink as hell. It is full with bugs, can't keep up with typing speed and showing unrelated search results.

In addition, try setting the search results to anything greater than 10 and you can't do it unless you disable this annoying feature.

It's the most obviously-stupid thing G has done in a while.

But I was thinking more along the lines of flooding the net with positive reviews for my sites. That way, there won't be the potential of a backfire when G quietly reverses itself and goes ahead and counts the links as always.

 

[beolion]

If they decide to do it then probably will apply the penalization to protect the potential customers and only after many complaints and manual review.

 

[oxonbeef]

So does this mean google are going to employ thousands of extra staff to manually review
if the millions of reviews on the internet are positive or negative?
I hardly think so.

 

[Webbers UX]

Time to hear someone to get me 1,000 neg reviews XD

 

[beolion]

So does this mean google are going to employ thousands of extra staff to manually review
if the millions of reviews on the internet are positive or negative?
I hardly think so.

No, maybe only when they are informed by the authorities, big scandals, "legal" reviews, complaints to the authorities with name, address...

 

[J0kerz]

I read the article and it doesn't make sense. How can a Goggle algorithm make a determination if a review is good or bad? Count the number of nasty adjectives and weigh them accordingly? See how many times they show up in sites like "GetSatisfaction"? Stupid and potentially libelous.

I would like to know that too...

 

[nerdmoney]

this reminds me of ebay's customer review policy. basically merchants - especially small ones who only get a few reviews - can be screwed by a crappy customer and have little recourse to it.

 

[charlie3]

I wonder if there will be a new service being provided here on BHW in the future..

"Providing 500 Negative Reviews to your competitors! Boost your rankings!"

Actually... that's not too bad

 

[bfellow]

I like your thinking charlie3. I give it 48 hours before we see it quite frankly.

 

[polocolto]

I take it you never heard of a "hacklink".

What is hacklink?

 

[Donnie Darko]

I'll give you $50,000 to take my two main competitors down

Monopoly money doesn't work in real life, kiddo.

 

[flaktrak]

I noticed something else in all this
The no follow debate has been settled once and for all!

no follow does help your SERP !!! *waiting for flames*

Every major review site uses no follow, yet people are being pushed up the SERP's by these links?

I know there could be other underlying affects, like news sites seeing the issue and then linking to the site in their own story using "do follow method"..
BUT the result is the same. You are mainly getting no follow links but still heading north in the SERPS

 

[alexandraM]

The NEW FIVERR offers will be up..
"I'll post 1,000 Neg ads about your competitor for $5"