Google have just announced “website satisfaction surveys“, a little interactive pop-up available through their Webmaster Tools service. It allows webmasters to gather feedback about their website, or even to make a bit of money by inserting survey questions for others, like a slightly less annoying and obtrusive version of those “win a free iPad” surveys.
The built-in questions are free, or you can pay a trivial amount to customize them (1 cent per response).
I do have one unanswered question about this, though – I wonder if the built-in questions will have an SEO impact? If a visitor answers “Was this page useful?” with “no”, would Google use that as a signal to drop your organic ranking? Would positive answers have a positive impact? If that’s the case it will inevitably lead to click-buying. We already have fake Twitter followers and fake Facebook likes, so that would seem like a natural step.
That obvious exploitability leads me to assume that these surveys won’t have any SEO impact, but I’ll wait on professional analysis to be sure.