A few weeks ago your Orlando SEO crew at Get The Clicks was intrigued about a comment made by Google’s Head of webspam, Matt Cutts, about a coming release to it algorithm called the Google Merchant Quality Score update.
This news come from the number of business owners who have long complained about seeing low quality or bad online merchants/retailers showing up ahead of search for good merchants.
This new update will not go into affect into sometime later in 2013 according to Cutts’ but could come soon.
Speculation has been going around since the announcement as to how this update would affect the way merchants do things online. Many have claimed that one possibility is for Google to push and benefit more financially from its Google Shopping offering.
They could potentially do much like Amazon does, and charge a fee off of sales done through their system. Google when then have the ability to see which merchants offered great products to customers, received high satisfaction ratings, and were consistently providing useful items or services to customers.
Another theory is that selling on one’s own website alone without any other systems in place to gauge effectiveness and satisfaction would decrease rankings. A merchant might NEED to sell on comparison engines such as Nextag or Amazon or Rakuten in order to maintain high search result rankings.
All in all, this will benefit many businesses who feel as if bad retailer/merchant results are coming up before theirs online. The downside is that small businesses might suffer.
There is word from many small business owners that it is just another way of squeezing more money out of them, and the update would benefit mostly the larger businesses. Some business owners feel that this algorithm change will not be able to accurately reflect their small business as most small businesses do not have the money or man power compared to large businesses to get the reviews they need from customers, their customer satisfaction is measured more on paper and pen methods or simply do not have the budget to be forced to add Google shopping as another selling feed.
What do you think about this possible change? Whatever the case, let us know your thoughts in the comments section below of our Get The Clicks, Orlando SEO blog.
Stephan Boehringer is the CEO of Get The Clicks, a web marketing company. Stephan has over 20 years of experience in the field of web marketing, and has been a speaker and consultant for many years. Stephan is passionate about web marketing and helping their clients be the best they can be.
Stephan Boehringer graduated from the University of Florida with a Bachelor of Science in Business, Management, Marketing, and Related Support Services.
