SEARCHENGINES
Google Has Mechanisms To Verify Merchant Experience Scorecard Metrics

A couple of weeks ago we reported that Google has a new set of ranking factors specific to the Google Shopping tab named the Shopping experience scorecard program. The concern was that merchants are asked to feed these metrics to Google and that the merchants will only feed positive scores, potentially manipulating the metrics and thus their rankings.
Google’s Alan Kent finally responded to those concerns after they were aired two or so weeks ago saying that Google has “mechanisms in place to verify the information merchants are providing.” So some how, Google is able to verify that the products are being delivered in time, that the check out page shipping cost was what was actually charged, that the cost to return was accurate and that if the customer does return the product, it is accepted within a specific return window. How does Google do this? I do not know, but Alan Kent from Google said the search company can.
He also added that if a merchant manipulates this information they can be excluded from the program, he said “merchants attempting to provide false information will be excluded from the program as this creates a poor customer experience.”
Here are those tweets:
Not a full answer (and there may never be one published), but we do have mechanisms in place to verify the information merchants are providing. Merchants attempting to provide false information will be excluded from the program as this creates a poor customer experience.
— Alan Kent (@akent99) March 3, 2022
As a reminder, the Google Shopping experience scorecard will be based on metrics such as, delivery time, shipping cost, return cost and the return window. The information is fed to Google through a data feed from the merchant. The ratings range from “Excellent”, “Comparable”, or “Opportunity” on each metric. To see your performance for each metric and your overall score, first sign in to your Merchant Center account, then from the navigation menu, click Growth, then click Shopping experience scorecard. To earn a badge, you must perform well relative to other merchants in all the required metrics. All metrics are calculated daily and have a lookback period to ensure sustained performance.
You can learn more about this over here.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
SEARCHENGINES
Vlog Episode #179: Jaimie Clark vs Jon Clark

Jaimie and Jon Clark came for a visit and we all spoke SEO and a lot more. Jaimie Clark is the VP of SEO at Centerfield, she was previously the Head of SEO at Wirecutter, a New York Times company. Jon Clark runs his own firm, Moving Traffic Media and was previously an SEO at some large companies.
In any event I first pinned them against each other in a game of SEO trivia – guess who won?
The trivia questions featured answers with Matt Cutts, Vanessa Fox, Panda vs Penguin, disavow files, Medic updates, new queries, John Mueller, Danny Sullivan, Gary Illyes, Ginny Marvin, Daniel Waisberg, Paul Haahr, Urchin, Android, YouTube, Fitbit, Apple, title links vs title tags, authorship, domain authority, RankBrain, EAT, YMYL, and more.
Hope you enjoyed this one, it was a lot of fun for me at least. But in part two we get into the real interview.
You can subscribe to our YouTube channel by clicking here so you don’t miss the next vlog where I interviews. I do have a nice lineup of interviews scheduled with SEOs and SEMS, many of which you don’t want to miss – and I promise to continue to make these vlogs better over time. If you want to be interviewed, please fill out this form with your details.
Forum discussion at YouTube.
Source: www.seroundtable.com
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