The Rip-Off Report Rip-Off
Here's a case for taxonomy of unethical designs, and an unusual one at that.
If you haven’t followed the interesting case of the website Rip-Off Report, it’s worth checking into. I’ll give you the gist here. The discussion started with Chris Bennet, who had some interesting things to say to Google. He sums up his post like so: “Rip Off Report is spamming Google’s index, and Google is currently letting them get away with it.”
Rand at SEMoz has a nice summary of the problem. According to Rand (and we’re paraphrasing here):
- Rip Off Report makes its money essentially through the extortion of businesses based on the search results (almost like a reverse reputation management campaign). Companies whose profiles appear on the site must pay the owner to have the information removed or have administrative comments added that an issue was resolved or the complaint was found to be false.
- Rip Off Report’s ability to do this is facilitated by the fact that the site ranks well at Google, in a way that violates Google’s Terms of Service.
In other words, content creators can add negative reviews of companies to the site. When one does so, it creates a page on the site. According to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, these user-created pages should not be indexed, but they are. The critical mass of indexed pages gives Rip Off Report a high PageRank, which in turn means that its results will come up near the top in relevant Google queries. The salience of its pages to innocuous search terms fuels Rip Off Report’s ability to allegedly extort money from companies.
This is an interesting case, not because Rip Off Report’s business model appears to be unethical (that shouldn’t strike any readers of BlogLESS as particularly aberrant), but because it seems to be facilitated by Google’s (weird) unwillingness to address the problem.
What I take from all of this is that if you want to do no evil it’s not enough to merely state this in your corporate position (or to specify it in relevant documentation). Google of all companies decidedly can’t be an innocent bystander, and this shows it. They’ve got to take an active role in addressing unethical behavior at it arises. What’s required of them is not to merely “do no evil”, but rather to “do good”.
| Tagged with: | Design Ethics, Google, Rip Off Report, Search Engine Optimization |
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Comments on this post
1.
First, you have your facts wrong, which may lead some to question the rest of your so-called facts. No one can get a ripoff report removed, for any reason, and the reasoning for that is clearly on the website. So to say “Companies whose profiles appear on the site must pay the owner to have the information removed” is a FALSE statement. Can’t be done. Won’t be done.
Your statement that “the site ranks well at Google, in a way that violates Google’s Terms of Service” is also a FALSE statement. If it violated their TOS, it would be disallowed. It has been thoroughly reviewed, questioned and commented on ad nauseum, but the fact remains that Google has NO ISSUE with Ripoff Report. It does no wrong. It follows the letter of the law, a fact the owner & his lawyers will readily remind you of.
Last, to say it “extorts” money is libel. If a company wants a report investigated and commented on, they can pay for the service. They don’t have to buy it. They have other means of recourse. It won’t come down (because it’s not for the Ripoff Report to play judge & jury), but they can pay to have report authors contacted & things made right, so their name gets a nice editorial written about them. Extortion is a legal term, one that you should probably look up before you go throwing it around. But what is happening with Ripoff Report is NOT extortion, any more than if you want your name removed from my blog and I say it’s my blog, and I don’t remove things, but you can pay me to do some research & if I think you’ve mended your ways, I’ll say something nice, too.
What protects Ripoff Report protects you too. Want that gone? Or maybe you’d still like to be able to say what you want on your blog…and let other people say what they want? Isn’t the net supposed to be free?
2.
Its obvious that you have not had someone put a false claim about your business on there, and yes, if you pay them, they will put your results in a harder to find location versus remove. Its a problem because anyone with a bad attitude that feels entitled to recieving services for free, and then doesnt, (from your company) can get on here and write whatever they want, and NO they DO NOT VALIDATE the claims. Its a place for people to put something up that will never get removed, and it doesnt even matter that its not true, it ruins your reputation. it needs to come down, or they need to validate EVERY SINGLE CLAIM.