I was glad to read in the Huffington Post today that cyberbullying is no longer helping New York eyewear merchant Vitaly Borker get top Google rankings and more business. Instead, Borker is behind bars charged with, among other crimes, fraud, interstate threats, and cyber stalking. A Manhattan judge has denied him bail.
Accordingly to the New York Times, Borker intentionally created a customer experience so vile, his customers would rant about it on the Internet, making his search engine rankings go higher on Google and his sales go up. His tactics allegedly included selling fake or faulty merchandise, threats of assault and sexual assault, and threatening e-mails and phone calls.
“It’s all part of a sales strategy, (Borker) said. Online chatter about (his company), even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. He closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: ‘I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my first complaint. I am in heaven. I’ve exploited this opportunity because it works. No matter where they post their negative comments, it helps my return on investment. So I decided, why not use that negativity to my advantage?”
Unbelievably, his strong-arm tactics seemed to haved worked because of a loophole in Google’s search algorithms, which failed to differentiate between positive and negative feedback, and simply took any mention of a particular site into account when judging its popularity.
Three days after the New York Times article appeared, Google announced on its blog that it had changed its algorithms so merchants with bad reputations would lose rankings.
“We were horrified to read about Ms. Rodriguez’s dreadful experience. Even though our initial analysis pointed to this being an edge case and not a widespread problem in our search results, we immediately convened a team that looked carefully at the issue. That team developed an initial algorithmic solution, implemented it, and the solution is already live. I am here to tell you that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results.”
That’s good news too. In a Web 2.0 world, abusing customers shouldn’t work as a sales strategy, even if only a sadistic few have the nerve to do it.
What do you think about this whole episode? Do you think any publicity can be good publicity in a Web 2.0 world?
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