Just a day after I posted an article about how Google is opening the barriers to entry, Marissa Meyer, a VP at Google announced that the data from SearchWiki could be used to change overall search results.
if “thousands of people” were to knock a search result off a search page, they’d be likely to make a change.
While large corporate companies most likely won’t be knocked out of the SERPs for high volume terms, what would happen if one affiliate website decides to create a network of bots that automatically vote down the 20-30 smaller guys that are ahead of your site. All of a sudden, their site starts showing ahead of many others. You don’t need to make your rankings better if you can make your competitions’ worse.
This may not seem like a big deal, but one way black hats operate is by using a exploiting a small hole in the system and scaling the crap out of it. Imagine if you could vote down 20-30 sites on 1000 or more different keywords. You may only go from getting 0 clicks per day to 1 click per day, but overall, you’re getting 1000+ clicks a day. Scale it a bit more and you’re getting 5000, 10,000, 50,000 free clicks per day.
Obviously, this is all just speculation, nobody knows how any of this will actually pan out. However, I do know that Digg used to be a much better site before it started to get gamed. Will Google suffer the same fate?
Other People’s Opinions…
Google Search Wiki To Soon Include An Off Button. Thank You, Marissa.
Black Hats Salivate as Google Prepares to Add SearchWiki to Algorithm
Google May Use SearchWiki For Ranking Purposes
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