Why Google Hates Payday Loans (But Loves Profiting from Them)
Google has taken some dramatic steps in recent months to address quality issues in its search results. Since the beginning of 2012, Search Plus Your World, Panda 3.2, Ads Above the Fold, Venice, Panda 3.3, Panda 3.4, Panda 3.5, Penguin, Panda 3.6, Knowledge Graph, and Penguin 1.1 updates have all been rolled out in addition to countless other changes to ranking factors, the algorithm, and the search results page.
So why are the results to some search queries still so bad?
Payday loans, while much maligned, are a credit product that some un-banked and under-banked Americans are forced to rely on. Regardless of its politics or opinion of the product, as the arbiter of search, it should be Google’s goal to serve the highest quality, most relevant, and authoritative results to its users in the organic results, in the local results, and in the paid results.
Google is miserably failing to accomplish this.
To illustrate, let’s take a look at the first two pages of results for the query “payday loans.”
What is a user’s intent when entering this query? While it could… Click here to read the Article
Thanks for sharing this great article Jer.
Good stuff.