The yearly South by Southwest Interactive conference is once again producing hype for the usual suspects among startups and upstarts. However, some interesting insights into the future of Google search have emerged thanks to Google’s Web Spam Assassin Matt Cutts.
We’ve seen for quite a while, with moves toward Zagat’s Ratings and online customer reviews, Google is attempting to work out it’s system for identifying quality and trustworthy local businesses. Google wants to protect users from finding bad merchants ranking at the top of their search results. The information released by Cutts further demonstrates the importance of quality online reviews.
Online Reviews: Ranking Factors
As part of a panel on how to rank better with search engines hosted by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, Matt Cutts provided some hints as to the importance of customer reviews and Google’s attempts to identify bad merchants:
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.”
Of course, if Google already has a system in place to penalize bad merchants, why are they apparently still ranking well, in some cases? ….One factor might be the continued growth in fake reviews. You can’t rely solely on reviews for assurance a business is really good.
That, of course, would mean that reviews were being used as part of the previous crackdown. Cutts seemed to confirm this when I asked, “if Google is already using review data, then what other signals would it turn to as part of a renewed effort.”
Cutts replied:
“We are trying to ask ourselves, are there other signals that we can use to spot whether someone is not a great merchant, and if we can find those, and we think that they are not all that spammable, then we’re more than happy to use those.”
Online Reviews: Identifying Fake Reviews
With the move from Google Places to Google Plus Local Business, there has been confusion in the migration of online reviews. Many local business have seen their online reviews disappear or even worse attributed to a competitor. This slow process might be a sign that Google is spending considerable resources in attempting to differentiate real from fake.
Authentic, high quality customer reviews obviously play a big role in signaling how the public views a business. Until Google can identify, “non-spammable” indicators of trust, customer online reviews will remain the top factor.
