Can Google's Block Feature Be Abused?

[aristotle]

In a report on an interview with Matt Cutts, [searchengineland.com ] at one point he is asked if site blocking by searchers can affect Google rankings. Part of the response is:

Quote:
MC: Explains the various ways sites can be blocked. The second version of Panda does use aggregated data about blocked sites, but that’s only when we have a very high level of confidence ...

This worries me, because someone might be able to use this feature to hurt a site's rankings. For example, suppose a politician has a mailing list of 20,000 supporters who made contributions to his compaign. He could send out an email which asks all of these people to use Google search to block the site of his campaign opponent, thereby hurting its rankings.

Even worse, a site about a controversial social issue could get a lot of blocks from people with an opposing view, and have its rankings hurt as a result.

So I'm worried that this feature could be used to bias Google's rankings against sites that take a particular position on a controversial political or social issue.

[Robert Charlton]

So I'm worried that this feature could be used to bias Google's rankings against sites that take a particular position on a controversial political or social issue.

I've seen something similar apparently happen with anti-virus products that allow users to tag sites for safety reasons. Occasionally, I've seen sites that are controversial politically labelled as unsafe by "community" feedback in such systems. Though it may also be that these sites did get hacked, I've never seen such feedback confirmed by the software itself.

One would hope that Google would have more sophistication than this. Matt's phrase, "high level of confidence", suggests that Google would look for other confirming signals, broken links or whatever, that would motivate users to block the sites.

[aristotle]

Well, I'm not too worried about organized attempts to hurt a website by this method. I know that certain frings political and social organizations sometimes mobilize their members to sent hate emails to the owner of a particular website, and that certain forums have also been used to orchestrate hate mail campaigns. But I think Google's algorithm would be able to detect an organized campaign to use the block feature against a particular site.

What I'm concerned about are individuals acting alone. If a website takes a minority position on some controversial issue, then many of its visitors could get angry about what they read, and decide to block it from their searches. The algorithm could take this as a sign of low quality content and lower the site's rankings. That what mainly worries me.