As noted by 97th Floor’s Chris Bennett in his exposé of Rip Off Report, Google has an ongoing romance with the site that has allowed many unvalidated complaint webpages to damage other businesses by their presence in the organic rankings. Where MSN refuses to list their site by principle and Yahoo barely at all, Google allows ROR to run rampant across its top ten, damaging companies irreparably in the process. But a closer examination suggests Google’s acceptance of ROR goes far beyond that. If taking away a negative has the equivalent effect of adding a positive, it seems Google is using Rip-off Report as a tool to help its own cash flow.
I’m not going to get into ROR’s strangely allowed violations of Google’s Terms Of Service, which has been covered elsewhere ad nauseum. Before I get to the facts of what I’ve found, however, I do want to show how ROR’s title tag structure is essentially defamation.
ROR would be the first to tell you that they don’t produce the content featured on their site, which is how they’re able to skirt lawsuit after lawsuit. The Communications Decency Act states that a website can’t be held responsible for content submitted by others - and that’s a good thing. No one wants to be held accountable for some unsolicited comment someone made on a blog. But regardless of what’s posted by those initiating the reports, ROR’s title tag structure (which they have full control of) is such that it slanders a business simply because a report was generated. The slander I’m talking about is what makes an ROR report so visible in the search results.
ROR’s title tag structure follows this pattern: Rip-off Report: Business Name Here
In the search engine results, (Google being the only engine that allows ROR to rank), this has the effect of painting any reported business as having committed a “rip off”. Logic follows that there can’t be a “Rip-off Report” unless a rip-off has occured. Webster’s defines a “rip-off” as: “an act or instance of stealing”. ROR’s title tags are essentially saying: “Reported For Stealing: Business Name Here”. Do you think it would be damaging if “Reported For Stealing: Your Name Here” showed up on a Google search for your name regardless of the validity of the claim?
But looking further into the definition of “rip-off”, how does it apply to the majority of the consumer complaints on the site? Some reports are blatantly false and unmerited, but even those which do involve a real life dissatisfied consumer have nothing to do with theft. If a customer and business have an issue with a documented return policy, is that stealing on the part of the company? If an ex-employee perceives he or she was wrongfully terminated and decides to tell their story, is that stealing? I would estimate that very few (if any) of the reports listed on ROR are anywhere near the textbook definition of a “rip off”.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter whether a business or individual deserves to be there. As soon as an ROR listing shows up for them, they’re damaged regardless. If you’re thinking of buying products or services from “XYZ Corporation”, and you see “Rip-off Report: XYZ Corporation”, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll buy elsewhere. While the American legal system promises “innocence until proven guilty”, individuals rarely think along those lines when they see inflammatory words such as “rip-off’. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume for a moment that every single Rip-off report ever filed is the gospel truth.
Imagine, if you will, the following scenarios:
A) An electronics dealer sells 100 pieces of audio equipment a year and has 4 rip off reports within that year
B) An electronics dealer sells 100 pieces of audio equipment a day and has 4 rip off reports within one year
In scenario A, the dealer has a dissatisfaction rate of 4%, which means there are probably twice as many customers out there who either would complain if they knew where to do so, or, are simply too lazy to do so. That’s an estimated 8% of dealer A’s customers. In short, if eleven people deal with dealer A, one is likely to be dissatisfied. One out of eleven isn’t a very good record. I wouldn’t want to shop with Dealer A if I were privy to these numbers.
In scenario B, the dealer has a dissatisfaction rate of .01%. If the same assumptions we made for Dealer A apply, Dealer B has a real disatisfaction rate of .02%, which means that 1 person out of every 5,000 is dissatisfied. Find me an Ebay dealer of any product with a record that good and I’ll show you someone I would be happy and confident to buy from.
But guess what? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because most people who see an ROR report in the listings will do what we all do when we see an inflammatory phrase associated with an entity…make an initial judgement toward that entity regardless of the facts.
Looking at it from another perspective, let’s say you’re on jury duty in a criminal proceeding, and you hear testimony from a witness against the accused. The last question the defense’s lawyer asks the witness is, “have you ever been convicted of rape?”, to which he answers, “yes”. Most people, myself included, would almost immediately discount his testimony based on his affirmative answer to the question. But what if the man, who is now 40 years old, was convicted of statutory rape at 17 years of age when he was involved with his 16 year old, consenting girlfirend. What if he and the girl eventually married, had 4 children and are still happily married to this day? What if the man had lived an otherwise upstanding life, paid his taxes on time and never had any trouble with the law since he was 17. Does that make a difference? I think it would for most people, because even though the law might be clear on what constitutes a rapist, there’s a colossal difference between the witness in the preceeding story and a guy dressed in black sneaking into houses at night with the premeditated intent to sexually assault someone.
Likewise, there’s a collosal difference between a reported 4.0% rate of complaint and a .01% rate of complaint. But again, it matters not. ”Rip-off” is a phrase with a very negative connotation that implies something far more damaging than a complaint. Though “rapist” probably isn’t the best analogy, the point remains that certain words fuel our hatred and anger like no other. In the world of business, and especially on the heels of Enron and Bernie Madoff, “rip-off” is definitely one of those words. Take this, in combination with the fact that anyone can make up anything they want about anyone else and get away with it on Rip Off Report, and you can see how Google is being highly irresponsible by allowing this to continue.
Rip Off Report should be required to alter/rename their site to indicate something more truthful in their tags or Google needs to devalue the site. I guess the title tag, “Complaints that May or May Not Be Valid: Business Name Here” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
So why hasn’t Big Brother taken action?
Good question. An even better question is why some ROR pages with the same age have high page PR and other’s don’t, yet an inbound link search reveals no external inbound links for either page and the same number of internal links. Could it be that ROR uses a robot.txt to keep from passing site PR to certain pages? Considering their well known extortionist “mediation service”, it wouldn’t suprise me. Still, that’s not something Google can control. To see what Google can control, let’s take a look at one of Google’s premier advertisers.
Blue Nile is one of the highest PPC spenders on the net, and Google appreciates them so much for it that they often use Blue Nile to test out new platforms - oddly at times when it provides them a significant competitive advantage. Over the holiday season 2008, Google allowed Blue Nile to place ads that dropped down their products within the ad itself, giving them a ridiculously unfair advantage over their competitors at a time when sales are at their peak. Why, you may ask? Because Blue Nile is the cash cow that keeps on giving. The company did $350 million in business in 2008, and it’s not a stretch to say that a very significant amount of money went to Google via Adwords.
I won’t link to any ROR on principle, but you can easily find Blue Nile’s ROR (PR 1) by typing in “Blue Nile Rip Off Report” in Google. The thing is, you’ll NEVER find it in the organic listings for “Blue Nile”. You can go ten pages deep where the listing all have no page rank whatsoever and you still won’t see it.
Another online Jeweler, Zale Corporation, is yet another Adwords big spender. Google loves their money so much they decided to test a geographic ad testing option with them. Unlike Blue Nile with two ROR’s, Zale corporation has 69 rip off reports. You won’t find any of those in the top 100 search results either. Think about it…69 complaints means at least some degree of interlinking within the already PR blessed ROR, and yet few of Zales ROR’s have any page rank whatsoever. It’s almost as though someone paid to have the PR removed. Still, some do have page rank, and yet we see the same situation as with Blue Nile. Plenty of pages with 0 page rank come up well before these damaging listings. Let me reiterate that point. These ROR’s aren’t pushed back by better listings a la some SEO strategy to boost the positive press. These company’s ROR’s with page rank don’t outrank pages with 0 page rank from sites with low to no page rank. These pages have no inbound links and are located on “bottom of the barrel” sites, yet they still outrank Blue Nile and Zales Corporation ROR’s. If I built a brand new site tomorrow expressely to rank for either of these company’s names, it likely would outrank their ROR’s. Something smells rotten in Denmark, my friends.
(On a side note, you also won’t find ”Zales Complaints” in the “Searches Related To:” options at the bottom of the first search results page, which has nothing to do with ROR and everything to do with Google. A quick look on Trellian reveals that “Zales complaints” does show some search volume while “Zales Canada”, which is listed at the bottom of the page, shows none. I don’t think either of the Keyword Discovery sets of numbers are accurate, but I do think they’re fairly reliable in terms of showing that one phrase is searched more often than another.)
The problem is, Google appears to be giving an unfair advantage to their premier advertisers by devaluing their ROR’s.
I manage PPC and SEO for a popular online jeweler, which is why I’m well aware of how my competition’s bad press is virtually buried. Unlike Blue Nile and Zales, however, I opted not to heed the call to up my Adwords spend despite direct contact from an Adwords representative. As you can easily read about with a quick search, generic jewelry PPC terms are highly competitive, cost a lot of money and yield very little in the way of profits - which is why most companies bid within their own brand. Bidding on generic “diamond” related terms is a great way to end up with a money losing ROAS. So, like “Ice.com” (whose gripe with Adwords you can read about here) and other jewelers, I opted to do what was fiscally sound for my client and cut a substantial portion of their spend that had shown low to no production over time. Our spend dropped considerably when my management took over, though our profitability went up and our ROI was much improved. Everyone was happy except the fine folks at Google, who lost out on the spend that was being wasted. Blue Nile bids for the number one spot on every single “Diamond” related term you can think of. While there may be a sound branding strategy behind that logic, no one can argue that the end result is an overwhelmingly high spend at the end of each month.
So what does that have to do with ROR?
As you might guess, we have some ROR complaints too. Far, far less than Zales, but ours manage to rank smack-dabbady-doo right in the middle of page 1 of the search results. How do we manage such attention from both ROR and Google when we obviously have a far better track record than Zales? Good question. It isn’t that they have more press or relevant listings, as parts of my client’s name are shared by hundreds of companies and they have plenty of overall press. You can find high PR pages well into the 30th to 40th listings of the search results for our name on Google just as you can for our competitors. Still, our ROR’s have higher PR and consequently higher rankings than our competitors yet nothing distinguishes our ROR’s from theirs. Not inbound or internal links, not meta data, not age…not anything other than the fact that they are big Adwords spenders and we are not. One site with a ranking page on my client has a site PR of 9 while ROR has a site PR of 6 and there is no discernable difference between the internal linking structures of the sites, yet the ROR page outranks the competing page with the exact same PR. The two competitors mentioned above have ROR’s that can’t outrank a back-nine page on a site created last Tuesday.
Before I go further, let me put my client’s industry in relation to ROR reports in perspective. Jewelry is a hard business for those of you who aren’t familiar. It’s even harder for companies like my client’s, Zales and Blue Nile, who sell online. First and foremost, it’s much easier to comparison shop online, which means a competitive jeweler’s margins get thinner and thinner as the dollar amount of the item goes up. Second, a very common issue in the jewelry industry is that local jewelers have a tendency to appraise the value of something a person bought far away (i.e. “online”) at less than the actual value in an effort to get a person to return the item and buy from them. They wouldn’t dare give a bad appraisal to their competitor across the street because they know they’d have to answer for it, but there’s nothing to fear from someone half a world away. The point is that I’m not suggesting Blue Nile or Zales are less than reputable companies. They both do high volume business and there are bound to be a few customers that feel they didn’t get a fair deal when you have thousands of salespeople and millions of dollars in transactions each year.
What I am saying is that my client’s business is like so many others out there who have been hurt and maligned by a front page listing indicating some sort of “rip-off” has occured. We have a rate of complaint that any corporation would die for (under .003%), but most people who see that listing will never know that fact or care to find out. Even if they read the ROR’s, which customers may or may not update regardless of what we do, they won’t see that we’ve tried to remedy every single complaint filed just as we would for any customer (though I have to say…a few who filed ROR’s were clearly in the wrong, completely misrepresented the situation to make my client look unfavorable and what they asked for was well above and beyond what any reasonable retailer would allow). The fact is, that listing above the fold and a few spaces under our listing brands us as something we are not, which is a “Rip-off”. How many other businesses have been unfairly branded a “rip-off” through the existence of ROR listings in Google’s search results? Quite a few.
If Google wants to continue to keep ROR in the forefront by granting it trust rank, then the playing field needs to be level. As explained above, our ROR’s have no more age or inbound links than either Blue Nile or Zales ROR’s, yet the PR for one of our ROR’s is much higher than any of their 71 combined. I hate to say it, but either Rip-off Report, Google, or both are manipulating the listings. There is no way our competition’s reports don’t merit the same PR our reports do being in the exact same category with the exact same internal linking structure and the exact same internal and external links. Furthermore, our competitor’s few ROR reports that do have gauged “PR bar” page rank can’t seem to outrank PR 0 pages with no age. I am firmly convinced that Google is keeping damaging Rip-off reports far away from their premier advertisers, which is the equivalent of accentuating the rankings of those reports that damage their premier advertiser’s competition.
A few last points of interest:
A) Blue Nile’s ROR was ranked on page 6 until recently, when I posted the above findings on the subject to the comments section of SEO moz’s “The Anatomy of a Ripoff Report Lawsuit“. Even on page 6, it had more PR and age than some of the other surrounding listings yet only got as close to the top ten as 5 pages back. It is now nowhere to be found.
B) You may be wondering, “Why is this post on an education site?” or “Why don’t you say the name of your client?” The short answer is that I’ve heard far too many complaints from business owners who have made their dissatisfaction with Google known regarding a Rip-off Report and soon thereafter found the ROR’s rankings above those for their own brand. Look around for yourself. I certainly take everything I read on the internet with a grain of salt, but it isn’t hard to find multiple comments from ROR victims who expressly state that complaining to Google made the issue far worse. My purpose here isn’t to make things worse for my client, but to call out Google (to whatever degree one small guy can) for what appears to me to be blatant use of ROR as a tool.
C) You may also be wondering, “Is this linkbaiting?”. The answer is no. In an effort to discern why my client had been singled out with an ROR listing whilst their bigger Adwords spending competitors had been left unscathed, I came across a lot of business owners who have been hurt by Google via ROR (many with no serious justification for it whatsoever - 97th Floor being a perfect example). Do I want it to get attention and inbound links so it will get more attention in the long run? Yes, but not for the purpose of boosting this site, which is unrelated to the subject matter and not owned by me. I want the article to get attention so that those who need to devalue ROR will hopefully be shamed into doing so for the benefit of my client and all businesses who have been damaged unfairly by ROR. It’s probably wishful thinking, but a part of me really wants to retain the belief that the net can be a level playing field for all. It can’t be level as long as Google is using ROR by skewing search results to hide their reports for some businesses while putting them front and center for others. Because of the fact that anyone with any motive can create an ROR and because Google gives them so much trust, ROR is not a fair or just proposition to begin with, but that’s amplified when some businesses are immune from their reports while others have to wear them like an albatross around the neck.
D) I noiced that anytime a “fight ROR” thread gets popular, it starts to generate what I call “crazy posts”, which are posts by people who seem to be on the verge of a mental breakdown. The last thing I want to do is come across like one of those people or a conspiracy theorist, but I seriously think there’s something behind it. Pardon my use of the phrase “whackjob”, but the more “whackjobs” that post on comment threads related to what ROR is doing to hurt legitimate businesses, the more it makes the entire argument look like it was created by people who want to imagine they’re being persecuted. It reduces the credibility of the article and all those who respond to it, which is too bad because a lot of innocent business owners and individuals with the best of intentions have been damaged by Rip-off Report. I don’t want to post comments, because sooner or later it ends up in call for a class action lawsuit, and not suprisingly, that’s when the crazy people come out in droves to post. Coincidence? Methinks not. Comments also bring out those who defend Rip-off Report. Their primary argument is that businesses who are the subject of bogus reports can’t be that damaged and even if they are, it’s an acceptable loss in light of all the consumers that have been helped by ROR. To me, this argument stinks of “Let’s just assume everyone’s guilty and imprison them all. Sure, a few innocents will live out their lives in prison, but what’s the suffering of a few in the face of the needs of the many”. Let me tell you, it’s easy to take this cowardly line of thinking when it’s not YOUR BUSINESS or YOUR REPUTATION on the line. Once it is, people with this attitude tend to change their attitude rather quickly. While I will approve comments on either side of the argument for discussion, no “crazy posts” will be approved.
E) Undoubtedly, some of you will think that my claiming Google has anything to do with ROR for their own gain is absurd. What you need to understand is that specific Adwords advertisers represent a sizeable portion of their bread and butter. The strange way in which those advertiser’s ROR reports are MIA in the search results leads me to think the worst. I don’t know if what I believe to be true is institutional or the result of a backdoor handshake from a Google higher-up, but I do know that some rankings just don’t add up based on the pattern set for other, similar pages from the exact same site. Regardless of what I think, Google is still culpable. Yes, Rip-off report has been accused of some very questionable (and illegal) behavior on the net and in court, but Google is ultimately responsible for giving them license to cause harm to those who are innocent of any wrongdoing - especially when other search engines saw the writing on the wall with ROR long ago. Let me repeat that: Google still empowers ROR while their competitors long ago realized the potential for misuse and took action. What I’m suggesting is that you ask yourself why? Why would Google do nothing when their closest competitors have devalued ROR? Is it for the integrity of the web? I don’t think you can use that argument for a website that hides behind the Communications Decency Act because it knows that the great majority of the complaints published on it are one-sided falsehoods manipulated through the site’s format to cause as much damage as possible. So again, why? There’s a reason for everything and there’s definitely a reason for Google allowing ROR to run roughshod over so many businesses yet conveniently be a non-factor for other businesses who are a big part of Google’s revenue stream. This article only covers an industry I’m familiar with, but I would imagine those in other industries could probably find similar instances if they took the time to look. Find me a noted high dollar Adwords advertiser and I’ll show you a business with Rip-off Reports that won’t rank.
F) You may be wondering if I feel that no ROR reports are merited. I feel as though there are probably many that are merited, but that doesn’t solve or excuse the problem of even one report being allowed to cause harm if unmerited. The long and short of it is that some complaints on ROR are part of a pattern of legitimate complaints and represent a real problem within a particular organization - and those complaints deserve to be heard. Some are flat-out fabricated, and those deserve to be ignored. Finally, some are legitimate but may be representative of the experience of less than .0001% of a company’s total customers, which makes them not very representative at all. ROR doesn’t do ANYTHING to find out which of these scenarios is accurate, which is why MSN and Yahoo decided to devalue them. Better to let 100 guilty go free than wrongly convict one, although in this case, I think a lot more innocent people and businesses are having their good reputations damaged for no real reason than the other way around. I don’t take issue with a site such as Rip-off report as long as they play by the rules, which should include NOT offering to serve as a mediator for complaints at a cost (which seems to me to be an obvious conflict of interest); NOT naming their site and labeling their title tags in a defamatory way such as to imply guilt for those with reports; and finally to NOT pass PR on to interior pages subjectively, but uniformly.