Chase Visa, Complaints, Splogs, and Google: An Amusing Mix

I'm not kidding -- check out what comes up third in a Google Search for "Chase Visa." Amazing. Click the thumbnail above to see a full-size screen grab.

OK, this is such a classic example of why organizations need to pay attention to the public conversation that I can't resist noting it.

I just Googled for "Chase Visa," the credit card division of a major bank. Check out what the #3 result that search is, as of today: My Bad Experiences with Chase Visa, by Ted Montgomery. He originally posted it Sept. 9, 2006 and updated it a few times since. It's pretty detailed, and I didn't plow through it all, but it's fair to say his tale is quite specific and unflattering.

I was amazed by this search ranking. Montgomery's page is just a static web page. It's not a blog, there's no feed. The text doesn't look particularly search-engine optimized in any way. And yet, there it is, damn close to the top. If I were doing PR for Chase Visa, that would really scare me.

So I had to look into this a little further...

At the bottom of his story, Montgomery noted: "Incidentally, go to Google.com, type in (or copy/paste) the following words, and perform a search:  chase visa incompetence. You will find a link to the page you now are reading in the #1 spot of over 100,000 links.  It gives me great satisfaction to know that this page has become so popular.  :-) E-mail me about this, if you wish."

Well, even without "incompetence" in my search (and who would search for that string, anyway?) Montgomery made the #3 spot for the far more likely search query "Chase Visa." So his complaint is more visible than perhaps even he realized.

It gets more bizarre. I was wondering who was linking to Montgomery's page. Did he become a cause celebre in the blogosphere? So I searched Google for links to his page's URL: http://www.tedmontgomery.com/chase.html. I got zero results! No kidding, try it yourself.

I thought that was weird. If no one was linking to that page, why was it ranking so high in the search results? And why would it garner a page rank of 4?

I ran a similar search on Yahoo for inbound link, and found 51. I checked out a couple, and then this started to make more sense. At least, I think so. Looks like Ted's page got scraped and redistributed among a lot of splogs -- spam blogs, like this one.

Granted, 51 links isn't a lot -- certainly not enough to rank Montgomery's page so high in search results for "Chase Visa." But I suspect that this link was added to a hell of a lot more splogs than what I'm finding today.

I know search engines are working hard to filter out splogs from search results -- as they should. But something still seems awry with Google's system. Unless I'm missing something big here (and that's certainly possible), Montgomery's page appears to have had inbound links only (or mainly) from splogs. If Google can filter out the splogs (which I assume is the case, since I found no inbound links through Google), why can't they also nullify the artificial search rank boost splogs give to the pages they link to?

Incidentally, when I searched Yahoo for "Chase Visa," I didn't see Montgomery's page in the first three pages of results. So even though some splog links to Montgomery's page are still showing up in Yahoo (those 51 results I mentioned earlier), Yahoo's not letting that artificially bump Montgomery's higher in its search results.

Splogs aside, the fact that Montgomery's complaint showed up in Google at all should be a cautionary tale for any organization: Your customers can speak for themselves to a mass audience, and at least some of them will do that -- especially when they feel mistreated or ripped off. It's entirely possible that their complaints might be as findable as your site.

People do talk. You're never going to be able to control or stop that -- and you shouldn't try. A better approach is that when people complain about you publicly, and especially when those complaints start to gain traction in search engines or conversational media, you should engage in the public conversation as constructively and transparently as possible.

...I'm not saying Chase Visa should have resolved the details of Montgomery's issue in public. However, they probably should have picked up on his online complaint quickly and engaged Montgomery in constructive private discussion to see if resolution was possible. If resolution was possible, they could ask Montgomery to update his posting to reflect that.

You can't buy goodwill, you can only earn it. Ultimately, having that complaint rank so prominently on Google is far more costly to Chase Visa than putting some extra effort into resolving a customer's problem.

Comments

[Greg]

I can't say for sure, but I recall that there is some human intervention in Google results, giving hidden quality scores to pages that are separate from page rank, but influence natural search results.

It may be that the page got noticed and a Google reviewer gave the page a little extra juice.

I have a site that went online less than 2 weeks ago, has under 1/4 of its pages indexed, hasn't had a sitemap submitted yet, and it doesn't show incoming links in the Google index yet. Yet the index page for items classified as "Just Plain Cute" places at #9 out of 1.39 million for that term in the Google search results.

Still, like he boasts about being #1 for "Chase Visa Incompetence", the #3 for Chase Visa probably generates 30x more traffic. I blogged about the value of search rank yesterday in fact, looking at how a #7 position for a more searched term brought me a lot more traffic than the #1 position for another.

[Michael Hiemstra]

Hey... my site is number #3 for those search terms right now, and I've only had one hit on the page from Google as far as I can see.

The only reason that I'm in the search results at all is because I have aggregated this post of Amy's :)