In aspiring to my mission of telling readers about books, I not only review here, but also at Amazon.com. If you know anything about Amazon, you know what they have a rating system for the reviewers/reviews. And if you didn’t know that, well now you do.
Imagine my surprise this morning when the buzz finally reached me the #1 spot held by the infamous Harriet Klausner dropped from said number one position to #445! HA! Now I don’t mean to imply that I’m glad Harriet was duped because I want to be number one, I’m a very realistic person, but if you’ve ever read Harriet’s reviews... they are essentially the same.
Simply not worthy of the numero uno status.
I’m not sure how exactly the ranks are calculated and why the sudden change, but I did find this on Amazon.
“You may have noticed that we've recently changed the way top reviewers are ranked. As we've grown our selection at Amazon over the years, more and more customers have come to share their experiences with a wide variety of products. We want our top reviewer rankings to reflect the best of our growing body of customer reviewers, so we've changed the way our rankings work. Here's what's different:
Review helpfulness plays a larger part in determining rank. Writing thousands of reviews that customers don't find helpful won't move a reviewer up in the standings.
The more recently a review is written, the greater its impact on rank. This way, as new customers share their experiences with Amazon's ever-widening selection of products, they'll have a chance to be recognized as top reviewers.
We've changed the way we measure review quality to ensure that every customer's vote counts. Stuffing the ballot box won't affect rank. In fact, such votes won't even be counted."
So what did the change do for me? I went from 59,985 to 10,264! I never really paid much attention to my ranking, but wow, I jumped up there quite a bit! And if I get a rank of 10,000 or better I get a Top Reviewers Badge!! Yeah, so I guess you have to have a rank of 1,000 or better not 10,000. Dang it all! But, hey I still moved up like 49,000 places... Hells ya! And I'm still I going to make that like a goal or something, it just might take me a long time.