A New York Times article on Sunday has triggered Google into action to prevent online sellers mistreating their customers, generating lots of complaints, and gaining top ranking in the search listing on the basis that “any publicity is good publicity”.
The change was prompted by an article in The New York Times on Sunday about Vitaly Borker, a Brooklyn-based online seller of eyeglasses. Mr. Borker claimed that he purposely harassed and alarmed some of the customers at DecorMyEyes.com because the online complaints actually worked in his favor in Google search results. The worse Vitaly Borker treated his customers, the higher the Google ranking of his New York designer eyeglass company rose. Or so it seemed.
But Google announced yesterday that it had changed the way it ranks search results so that unscrupulous merchants would find it harder to appear prominently in searches.
Amit Singhal is a Google fellow and 20-year search veteran who denied that DecorMyEyes.com’s top rankings were the result of the large number of complaining references: “We were horrified by the story. I am here to tell you that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results. Some of the most reputable links to Decor My Eyes came from mainstream news websites such as the New York Times and Bloomberg. We developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience. We can say with reasonable confidence that being bad to customers is bad for business on Google.”
The solution seems to have worked in the case of DecorMyEyes. By Monday night, the company was languishing on page 14 of a Google search for “designer eyeglasses.”
