Google, via Matt Cutts, has said that they plan to take bad merchants to task. Poor customer experience and I guess bad online customer service, will be taken in to account and effect rankings. How this will be accomplished has not been revealed.
From 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.
One way they might implement this check is via fake reviews. What ever method they use, time to re-examine how you deal with customers…
