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No Press Is Bad Press Even Online

Posted by samzenpus on from the if-you-don't-have-anything-nice-to-say dept.

otter42 writes "The NYTimes has an 8-page exposé on how an online business is thriving because of giant amounts of negative reviews. It seems that if you directly google the company you have no problem discerning the true nature; but if you instead only google the brand names it sells, the company is at the top of the rankings. Turns out that all the negative advertisement he generates from reputable sites gives him countless links that inflate his pagerank."

4 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Hyperlinks and Pagerank 101 by Haedrian · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This shows the failure of how hyperlinks works and how the page rank algorithm works.

    The Page rank algorithm determines how useful a site is based on the amount of hyperlinks TO the website. Each count is multiplied by how reputable a website is - so if its a huge website which brings in millions of users - then its more likely to be reputable than a website on a free host which gets 10 hits a year.

    Now the problem with hyperlinks is that there is no semantic information attached to them - if you place a link on a page - there is no way to mark it as "This is a dangerous page" for example, or "This guy is an idiot, someone shut him up" or "This is an adverstiment, they have nothing to do with us". So the crawler notices a reputable website is linking on another site - and gives points accordingly.

    The best solution is to add semantic information to hyperlinks - but that's not supported yet...

  2. Nofollow? by WPIDalamar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Perhaps review sites should add nofollow attributes to their external links

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

    Maybe just for negative reviews?

  3. Re:The kneejerk reactions by Blue+Stone · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Let's not forget CitiBank who apparently didn't give a shit that someone fraudulently closed the woman's disputed charge.

    I have an account run by CitiBank, and this has made me decide to close it - before I get subjected to their don't care approach.

    --
    Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
  4. 4Chan assemble by frap · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wouldn't wish 4Chan's wrath on my worst enemy but it sounds like this guy needs a taste of his own medicine to me.