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01-02-2011 06:52 PM |
Search Algo changes due to Nasty NY TImes story
The NY Times ran a story sometime ago about a shady (pardon the pun) eyewear seller who bragged that the more people complained about his online store, the higher in the SERPs he got. Google got a hold of this story and made some changes to the algo. Instead of merely counting negative reviews neutrally--ie., no effect on a site's ranking, Google makes them count negatively, ie., it can help bury your rankings.
Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/...s-bad-for.html
Quote:
Use sentiment analysis to identify negative remarks and turn negative comments into negative votes. While this proposal initially sounds promising, it turns out to be based on a misconception. First off, the terrible merchant in the story wasn?t really ranking because of links from customer complaint websites. In fact, many consumer community sites such as Get Satisfaction added a simple attribute called rel=nofollow to their links. The rel=nofollow attribute is a general mechanism that allows websites to tell search engines not to give weight to specific links, and it?s perfect for the situation when you want to link to a site without endorsing it. Ironically, some of the most reputable links to Decor My Eyes came from mainstream news websites such as the New York Times and Bloomberg. The Bloomberg article was about someone suing the company behind Decor My Eyes, but the language of the article was neutral, so sentiment analysis wouldn?t have helped here either.
As it turns out, Google has a world-class sentiment analysis system (Large-Scale Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs). But if we demoted web pages that have negative comments against them, you might not be able to find information about many elected officials, not to mention a lot of important but controversial concepts. So far we have not found an effective way to significantly improve search using sentiment analysis. Of course, we will continue trying.
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