Google Takes Aim At Poor Customer Service

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It started with a New York Times article. One that featured a business that kept popping up at the top of search indexes, even though it had hundreds upon hundreds of negative reviews. Upon further investigation though, it may have been popping up on top because of all those negative reviews.

Google’s world is based on keywords and a series of complex algorithms that track links and hits to your business and, at least before this incident, didn’t discriminate between links that were complaints and links that were positive or just links and keywords related to your business.

The business, which shall remain nameless to avoid giving it another keyword hit, was thriving on practicing poor customer service so that its clients would go online and en mass and bash the company. The company would add unwarranted charges to people’s bills, send fake products (instead of the genuine name brand items that were ordered), and then threaten the clients with bodily harm when they tried to fight these things, or get refunds on their money. This flooded the internet with the company ...
... name, so when someone typed in a product they carried into a Google search engine, their business popped up first, even above the product’s manufacturer.

The New York Times published the article on November 26. By December 1, Google had responded. The internet giant has always been very secretive about its methods and various coding techniques because they don’t want people to try and cheat the system in order to get on top of a search index. However, they did say that they put certain algorithms in place to keep companies like the one featured in the article from ranking number one.

According to Google’s blog, “being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results.”

While they openly admit there are most likely unforeseen loopholes in their system that innovative (for lack of a better term) business owners will be able to uncover. But until then, it seems this is a fair solution. Hopefully it will, at the very least, keep unsuspecting consumers from falling into the trap of feeling that this business is reputable and their dollars are safe to be spent here because it’s number one on a Google search index.

The fix was already live at the time Google posted the blog, and when I typed in one of the business’s products in Google they didn’t even pop up on the first page, in fact the manufacturer is back on top.

So, hopefully Google has squashed this particular smear campaign, at least for now. For the hundreds of consumers that have already been wronged by that business, there isn’t much more that Google can do. They will simply have to keep battling their credit card companies and filing complaints against the original business and hope for the best. However, these measures should keep fresh, unsuspecting consumers from finding businesses that thrive on complaints, until they come up with a new technique anyway.