As any modicum of research might tell you, EDriven Concepts is a company that’s seen a growing number of consumer complaints and negative reviews all over the Internet. In order to counteract this mounting negativity surrounding its brand, EDriven Concepts has begun posting bogus reviews and testimonials across multiple accounts on a handful of prominent blog sites. (To learn about these efforts in more detail, read this article about EDriven Concepts written by fellow industry experts.) Unfortunately, the fact that all of the low-quality, duplicate content posted by EDriven Concepts is actually ranking on Google reveals a major flaw in the algorithm that Google is using.
Implemented under the moniker “Panda,” Google’s new algorithm is intended to give Google users a more satisfactory search experience. By implementing this update, Google hopes to provide searchers with relevant results and useful content. The two primary goals of the Panda update are:
- To weed out low-quality, keyword-saturated pages
- To promote pages with unique, high-quality content
According to a post from February 2011 on the Official Google Blog, “This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”
Obviously, EDriven Concepts’s practice of falsifying and duplicating reviews via multiple blog accounts is akin to copying content from other Web sites. Moreover, the majority of these bogus reviews are given the title, “is edriven concepts a scam,” which leads curious searchers to read a fictitious review that ultimately has nothing to do with whether the company is a scam. It goes without saying that such content is “not very useful.” In addition, the company is even associated with the URL http://rankshore.com, which has content exclusively about EDriven Concepts and no mention whatsoever of a company named “Rankshore.” This is a transparent attempt on the part of EDriven Concepts to deceive average Google users and lead them to irrelevant, substandard content.
With all of this considered, one would assume that the basic tenets of Google’s new algorithm and operational guidelines would keep EDriven Concepts’s inferior, misleading, and duplicate blog posts from ranking favorably. However, the opposite has happened.
Somehow, all of the pages and blog posts propagated by EDriven Concepts have managed to achieve high rankings on Google’s search results. In other words, there is a major flaw in Google’s new algorithm that is promoting sites with low-quality, duplicate content despite its very own set of guidelines.
What’s especially problematic about this flaw?
- Fraudulent reviews are outranking other important, relevant Web sites regarding EDriven Concepts.
- Pages containing valid warnings about the EDriven Concepts scam are being pushed back to Page 2 of Google’s results. These are pages that could actually prove beneficial to users seeking objective information.
- One particular site containing valuable audio samples of recorded phone calls proving the fraudulent activity of EDriven Concepts is even being outranked by these phony blog entries.
Unfortunately, because Google is the final authority, there’s nothing we can do to change the fact that EDriven Concepts’s forged, duplicate content is ranking. All we can do is alert Google users to this issue so that they will be more diligent in sifting through their search results in the future, and hope these flaws will be corrected as more versions of Panda are rolled out over time.