Merchant reviews update (2010): demoting bad merchants

What Google changed#

On 1 December 2010, Google Fellow Amit Singhal wrote on the Official Google Blog that Google had “developed an algorithmic solution” which detected the merchant described by the New York Times “along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience.” The algorithm was incorporated into Google’s search rankings.

Google explained what it chose not to do. It did not block the single offender, because that would not solve the general problem. It rejected sentiment analysis, arguing that demoting pages with negative comments could bury information about elected officials and controversial topics. It also noted that the merchant was not really ranking on links from complaint sites, many of which used rel=nofollow.

Google gave the change no name. Merchant reviews update is a label the SEO industry adopted.

When it rolled out#

The trigger was a New York Times story by David Segal, dated 26 November 2010, about the eyeglasses seller DecorMyEyes. Google’s post of 1 December 2010 said the fix was built “in the last few days” and that “the solution is already live.” Google did not give an exact launch day, so 1 December 2010, the date of its post, is the first confirmed date. No completion date was stated.

What is known about its impact#

Google published no share of queries affected. The only scope it gave was that the algorithm caught the merchant from the Times article and hundreds of others. Google said it could not reveal the underlying signals, data sources or how it combined them, to avoid helping people game the change.

What site owners should do#

Google’s ranking systems guide does not list this 2010 change as a named system, current or retired, and Google has not said what became of it. Its current guidance covers the same ground:

• Earn trust with customers. Google’s helpful content guidance asks whether someone researching the site would come away with the impression that it is well-trusted.
• Do not try to earn links through bad behaviour or controversy. Google’s spam policies define link spam as links created primarily to manipulate rankings.
• If you link to a site you do not endorse, qualify the link, as the complaint sites in this case did with rel=nofollow.

How to check whether it affected you#

This is historical. Search Console keeps 16 months of data, so late 2010 can only be checked in archived analytics, by comparing Google organic traffic before and after 1 December 2010. The Google Algorithm Updates timeline lists every update with its dates.

Related updates#

• The domain diversity update was the previous announced ranking change, in August 2010.
• The scraper filter followed in January 2011.