> It is not until the last page of an EIGHT page article that it becomes clear that Mr. Borker is quite troubled financially. This is no formula for success.
> He won’t get specific about his annual income, but he tallies the business from the day before: 120 orders, gross revenue of roughly $20,000, which yielded perhaps $3,000 in profit, out of which he had to pay his employees — mostly women who answer phones and e-mail, off-site — and advertising.
Even if he's paying those order-takers lavishly (unlikely) and his site-related expenses are exorbitant, he should still be clearing at least 2/3 of that. He won't be buying a private island any time soon, but a one-man company turning a ~$2,000/day profit from home isn't exactly what I'd call financially troubled (though this may end badly for him otherwise).
"Like any online community that cares to combat spammers, we code our user-submitted links so that Google ignores them for the purposes of calculating page rank (specifically, we attach “rel=nofollow” to anchor tags). Somebody trying to gin up their Page Rank by encouraging complaints on Get Satisfaction would be sorely disappointed."
Uhm.. their links ARE dofollow. Do a quick CTRL+U and then search for "home" and "contact". They both clearly say "Hey, Google, come check me out. The water's fine."
EDIT: I see that their reviews are nofollowed, but most of the linkjuice has already been passed by the site in these sidebar links. Additional boost isn't supplied by negative reviews, no, but it is in businesses best interest to submit here so that they can get that linkjuice push.
I feel like people who use such a light weight for body text care more about the chunk of text "looking good" instead of actually being, you know, readable. Especially on a dull yellow.
+1 for iReader. I had to use it too. I find myself using it surprisingly often, even in this day and age, and even on some UX-savvy websites who should clearly know better.
I applaud the use of rel="nofollow". The New York Times article seemed to blame both Get Satisfaction and Google, at least in the beginning, and that's ridiculous.
I see, so they missed a few links. It appears to have been fixed now, though, because I can no longer find that HTML on the page.
I wonder if Google will ever be smart enough to take ranking highly for searches like "scam" or "fraud" into account (without penalizing the people exposing scams and frauds) when computing someone's pagerank?
And yet, he is still a top search result somehow. I wonder if other forums are not being as dilligent with rel=nofollow, other legit factors are helping his ranking, or if it's all seo.
If Mr. Borker is threatening and defrauding his customers, as he clearly seems to be doing, this is a matter for the authorities. They should have no trouble shutting down his business and website.
The SEO aspect is interesting, but rel="nofollow" is not the way to solve this, nor is it Google's job to do so. That said, kudos to GetSatisfaction for their diligence.
I agree that the site looks extremely shady. But that doesn't mean unsuspecting people deserve to get harassed by that asshole. I think we take for granted how well versed we are on the internet and how relatively new the concept is of buying things online. Many, many internet users still aren't accustomed to the tricks of trolls and often click on the first thing they see on Google b/c they assume they're getting things from a place that everyone else talks about (presumably because it's at the top of a Google search).
I do basic SEO as part of my job, so I know a few basic tools that can look through this. Google keyword checker gives 590 searches a month for that phrase, so it's not too competitive. I'm sure he ranks for a lot of these tail phrases though.
A lot of his juice comes from every page on his site linking with good anchor text to every other page (seems to be over 10,000 according to Yahoo Site Explorer). The fact that he ranks so low (on my Google he's number 6 or so) even with this on such an easy term shows something, doesn't it?
There's another massive site that links to him with anchor text a lot too. It's hard to even find any of these criticism backlinks in there: it's entirely possible these critics don't count at all anyway. After all, it seems to be just a theory of the store owner.
> He won’t get specific about his annual income, but he tallies the business from the day before: 120 orders, gross revenue of roughly $20,000, which yielded perhaps $3,000 in profit, out of which he had to pay his employees — mostly women who answer phones and e-mail, off-site — and advertising.
Even if he's paying those order-takers lavishly (unlikely) and his site-related expenses are exorbitant, he should still be clearing at least 2/3 of that. He won't be buying a private island any time soon, but a one-man company turning a ~$2,000/day profit from home isn't exactly what I'd call financially troubled (though this may end badly for him otherwise).