In the middle of server problems due to hacked email contact forms of some hosting clients I have, and Thunderbird .msf file problems in rebuilding, with online client chat inquiries and complaints for server slowdown, SEO Philippines member and excellent photographer Anton Sheker kept asking me a question. He was asking me if I see the text: Was this link useful? in the Google search results. I totally had no idea what he was asking.And he was asking if it was a Firefox plugin. But I was not aware of any Firefox extension asking Was this link useful? Not even Aaron Wall’s SEO for Firefox had it. I was still puzzled with this Was this link useful? text, until he sent me a part of his Google organic results in a screenshot.

I did notice he had SEO for Firefox because of the links below the search box, so at first I thought my SEO for Firefox was not updated. But why in the world would Aaron Wall ask you if the SERPs ranking was useful? So I searched Google and I found every main SEO site talking about it.

This seemed to be old news for Adwords, where Google was asking people if the link was useful. Probably to evaluate the landing page score is known to be connected to the keyword bidding prices. But got this to appear in the organic search results, the news still seems to be relatively new.

John Battelle was able to blog about it almost a week ago, and Loren Baker reported this on Search Engine Journal just 2 days ago. I just learned about this from Anton Sheker, who happened to be wondering why he was seeing it, but for some reason, up to now, I haven’t seen any search result like this. I guess it is not yet implemented on all Google datacenters. And for some strike of bad luck, I just can’t seem to connect to any datacenter right now that has this new Google organic feedback feature.

And if people answer the question with a Yes or a No, how will this fit into the algorithm? The pagerank formula? The trustrank formula? And can SEO sabotage be done here where competitors keep answering “No” to try and influence the search results? And the company that owns the result with the question will keep answering “Yes” to influence the search results to get higher ranking? For sure, it is needed somewhere in the ranking formula otherwise they would not be asking the question: Was this link useful? But the question is how much weight is placed on the answers they get from this question? Or maybe this is just part of their blackhat filtering and flagging tools. Where a site that gets a lot of “No” answers will be checked further. Let’s see how it goes and all of us observe.