Negative Reviews Can Hurt Site Rank

If you've read the New York Times in the last week you might have seen a bit of a horror story a customer experienced with a vendor she found on Google — a vendor who was at the top of the search results.

While this is an extreme case, it was enough for Google to take notice. On December 1 Google announced that it has made changes to its search algorithm (Being bad to your customers is bad for business):

[W]e developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience. The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue[...]

What's key here is that Google no longer rewards just any inbound links. Instead it may now penalize negative inbound links, using an algorithm it won't be sharing for fear of people gaming the system. This is yet more motivation to make sure you provide a good experience for your users/customers and to do a little policing on the links pointing to your site (which you can do with Google Analytics or by searching opinion sites).

Read more: Negative Reviews Can Now Affect Site Rank Downward