The days of anonymously spouting off vitriolic hate over the internet may be closer to an end than we all realize.
According to this article on TIME’s Techland, “Googlebots” or as TIME refers to the them, Google’s infamous web spiders, used to be unable to index comments; however, this limitation to the search world seems to be over. Googlebots now have the functionality to index Facebook, Livefyre and Disqus comments.
There has been a recent effort by many news websites to clean up the tone of the conversation by forcing readers to comment through Facebook, allowing a real face and name to be attached to the comment. They have seen some successful results and I have a feeling that if people realize that these comments will now be visible to everyone they might show a little bit more restraint. Or not, sometimes a racist jerk is just a racist jerk.
Additionally, these comments will factor into a website’s SEO, search engine optimization, ranking. What is not clear is if negative comments will negatively effect their SEO ranking. I think the main take away for businesses about this new technology is that if someone says something negative about your business or product, it is now liable to end up in a Google search. As our own Miss Anita points out in this post, companies are starting to care a bit more about their customer service and the sentiment the public has towards their brand. I believe the rate of change will quickly increase when companies see the real results of this new Google function.
Now that you’ve finished reading this go and change all of your Intense Debate information!
