Past week, a sunglasses website made it in the news for using bad customer service towards its advantage by earning a higher Google ranking. Sounds bizarre?? It is. A sunglasses website used negative comments and bad reviews towards its advantage and exploited Google's algorithm towards achieving a high organic ranking.
After (some say purposefully) giving bad service to customers, they forced customers to post complaints on sites with higher Page Rank like complaintsboard.com. As you probably know, getting good backlinks benefits the organic search rankings for your website & this is what exactly happended. The website would continously show up on the top till Dec 1....now no more!! Google did not have a facility to punish online merchants based on the text symantics on high page rank sites. So while it was difficult to earn good comments & hard to find high PR sites to backlink to, posting a bad review on high PR sites seemed to be a better choice for the website owners.
Post Dec 1, Google has implemented an algorithm that will track down such merchants and punish them by giving them poor organic rankings based on the reviews that people have posted. So no matter how much the PR of the website is....if you have a bad rating and a back link....that will be seen negatively by Google and you would loose ranking.
The time has come to be more serious on your online credibility and what people talk about you online. Are you taking this seriously for your business too?? And would you be affected? Give it a thought!! I thought this would be a very interesting story (also an eye-opener) for businesses to take online reviews seriously. Next time when you provide a bad service just think about the possible repurcussions.