I’ve been thinking about Google’s concept of USER filtered/altered rankings on organic search and I am skeptical that it will fly.

I mean really, how many “regular” (i.e. non digirati) folks will actually bother to drag a more relevant search result higher up a SERP? First of all, how will they even know this is possible; second of all, if by some miracle Google gets them to read an explanation of how to use the feature, any bets on the percentage of folks that will bother? Classic case of, sure I could spend 5 seconds to move a more relevant result onto the spam site above it, but What’s In It For Me?

Even for folks like you or I, who would supposedly be aware of and willing to use the feature, if I’m searching for something and come upon a crap site, I hit back and click on the next entry down. It would have to be REALLY bad to make me spend the time to drag the next result above it.

I’m just not feeling the love on that particular idea. And even if people jumped on the band wagon and started modifying organic search results, if a site is optimized using enduring SEO techniques it won’t be crap in the first place. Therefore no reason for the site to be penalized.

It also opens up the possibility of a new cottage industry, find a 1000 people on different IP addresses, pay them a buck or two to move a page to the top of the serps (probably need to space it out over time, however nothing a simple email auto responder couldn’t handle quite nicely) and voila! Your page is now #1.

Yeah, now that I think it through, Google should definitely implement this feature, but not right away. I need some time to build my list