Cre8pc, by Kim Krause Berg, Usability & User Interface Analyst, Internet Marketing Ninjas

Gather ye horses, trusty steeds, flask of whiskey and your Google bot dogs, for we have word of another fox in the rank-house and Matt Cutts has sounded the trumpets!

Bad Merchant? Google May Drop Your Rankings Later This Year reports that  Matt Cutts signaled yet another blow to spammers and bad online businesses.

Cutts said:
We have a potential launch later this year, maybe a little bit sooner, looking at the quality of merchants and whether we can do a better job on that, because we don’t want low quality experience merchants to be ranking in the search results.

So far, other attempts to rank credible web sites in the ecommerce space created a delightful new revenue stream for writers and fake user reviews.  Even Matt isn’t sure how they can truly tell the difference between a good or bad merchant.

Says our Hunt Master,

We are trying to ask ourselves, are there other signals that we can use to spot whether someone is not a great merchant, and if we can find those, and we think that they are not all that spammable, then we’re more than happy to use those.

I may be riding my gorgeous white mare in the back of the hunting group but I do have a teeny suggestion for the Leader of the Pack. How about using the ability to USE the site as an indication of a good online merchant? Why not support sites that can be used by EVERYBODY (accessibility), searchable on all devices (responsive), and pass usability audits?

Try Usability!

Customer experience design is usability design. An online business that wants to rank should be able to prove it wants real customers who arrive with confidence and trust.

So Matt, why not make web site usability a rank factor?