If Users Don’t Like Your Site, Your Google Rank­ing Goes South!

Google an­nounced that the al­go­rithm changes from the so-called ‘Farmer Up­date’ are be­ing rolled out in­ter­na­tion­ally. But that’s not all.

They’ve added a new fea­ture to their rank­ing al­go­rithm, and it ba­si­cally says:

If users let Google know they don’t like your site, your rank­ing will suffer.

Google’s Amit Sing­hal ex­plained it this way:

„… we’ve also in­cor­po­rated new user feed­back sig­nals to help peo­ple find bet­ter search re­sults. In some high-con­­fi­­dence sit­u­a­tions, we are be­gin­ning to in­cor­po­rate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms.”

I don’t know what ‘some high-con­­fi­­dence sit­u­a­tions’ are, but at this point it prob­a­bly means it’s a mi­nor change that will not have too much ef­fect on the over­all search re­sults. But, I’m pre­dict­ing that …

We are go­ing to see a huge shift in how Google rank­ings are measured.

5 years from now we will have rank­ings that are LARGELY based on user votes.

A long time smart peo­ple have been claim­ing that it is vi­tal to build high qual­ity sites, be­cause Google wants high qual­ity. But ac­tu­ally that is NOT EXACTLY what Google wants.

It’s clearly Google’s goal to give users what they are look­ing for, what they like most. Par­don me, that’s not nec­es­sar­ily the same as high qual­ity.

Any­way, Google will work hard to find ways to do this.

  • In the past Google counted web­mas­ter votes, us­ing back­links as a mea­sure for site ranking.
  • In the fu­ture Google will be count­ing user votes, be it block­ing sites, or ref­er­enc­ing them so­cially in Face­book, Twit­ter and the like.

=> In the long run the in­ter­net users will de­ter­mine which sites are rank­ing high, and which sites go down.

It’s harder to fig­ure out for Google, but it’s def­i­nitely com­ing at you!

SEO­moz has re­searched how URL men­tions on Twit­ter and Face­book seem to in­flu­ence a site’s rank­ing already:

https://www.seomoz.org/blog/facebook-twitters-influence-google-search-rankings

What do you think? Tell me in your comments;

  1. Will my pre­dic­tion come true?
  2. Will site own­ers who play the so­cial game well (de­spite hav­ing crappy sites) win over those who build ex­cel­lent sites?
  3. Or will great con­tent fi­nally be king?