“Sentiment is the poetry of the imagination”. Google has now started
using Sentiment Analysis to rank websites on its search engine. This
would slightly affect the rankings of all the existing websites. SEO is
now going to add a new criteria into its text-book.
Sentiment Analysis is exceptionally challenging as computers are very
poor at understanding irony, subtext, implicit context and all kinds
of other linguistic constructs that a human reader easily comprehends.
From the Google Blog:
A recent article
by the New York Times related a disturbing story. By treating your
customers badly, one merchant told the paper, you can generate
complaints and negative reviews that translate to more links to your
site; which, in turn, make it more prominent in search engines. The main
premise of the article was that being bad on the web can be good for
business
The sentiment analysis identifies negative remarks and turn negative
comments into negative votes. Using sentiment analysis in search rank
is tricky however, because it would also pull down sites about unpopular
politicians and controversial issues.
This led to a state of dubiety in choosing a solution for the “Bad
to customers = Good for PageRank” problem. Instead of using either of
those two solutions to account for cases like the one described in the
New York Times article, Google instead compiled a list of hundreds of
merchants that provided “bad user experience” and algorithmically forced
them lower.
Further, Google admits that it may not be a flawless method in
ranking algorithms. But for now customers using Google search for
shopping, and status of Google in public, got just a bit safer.
0 comments:
Post a Comment