News - Google changes search algorithm to demote ‘bad’ merchants

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Online merchants that Google judges to provide an extremely poor user experience will be punished.

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Read more.

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Furthermore, the timing of this move is especially poignant coming just a couple of days after the European Commission announced it was going to investigate complaints that Google lowers its ranking for sites that compete with it.

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Google "search" and "search engine". See what appears :)

I know there's a lot more to it than that, but I was pretty shocked when somebody told me!

Bing is the third result. Google isn't even on the first page of "search" and is sixth of "search engine" :confused:

That article is dead on the money in my view, and the crunch of it is ....

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Of course it's laudable that Google is striving to prevent websites appearing near the top of search results for the wrong reasons, however much this move may have been motivated primarily by PR needs. But the precedent of Google introducing its own qualitative judgments into the ranking algorithm is a worrying one.

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My first question is that if Google are going to start loading sites based on their own subjective assessments, what gives us any confidence in trusting their assessments, or indeed, in their motivation.

I think we should all be aware of the "Do no evils" dominance in the search market. Google isn't a mile off monopolising the UK search market (Bing's stumbling - maybe facebook will prove a tougher adversary).


Take for instance the fact that over time Google's gradually reduced the number of organic (site's who aren't paying) search results displayed on each page. Arguably, this means that the onus is shifting away from the quality of the site, to how much it's owners can stump up for advertising.

Which brings me to Google Adwords, and its somewhat opaque bidding system for keywords. I don't think that there's anything wrong with Google setting the cost's for advertising on it's site, but I do question the reliability of it's "keyword" tools which are supposed to guide advertisers to find the optimum keywords/adverts for their site. It would be reassuring if an independent party reviewed this information. As much as some are accused of SEO'ing/Gaming the SE's I think the SE's are also gaming us when it comes to advertising costs.


Back on topic - I was under the impression that google has based it's rankings on subjective assessments for some time, take the inclusion of Social Media for instance - can 500 million facebook users be wrong? :)