Story of a bad business that gamed Google's search system

Story of a bad business that gamed Google's search system

Posted: Friday, January 7, 2011 12:00 am

Story of a bad business that gamed Google's search system
By Kim States

Since its inception in 1912, the Better Business Bureau (BBB) has stood for trust in the marketplace. We’ve staked our reputation on making the case to businesses that they do well by doing good. That is, if businesses approach their consumer interactions with honesty, both businesses and consumers will be better off.

Unfortunately as technology advances, unscrupulous businesses sometimes figure out ways to temporarily game the system. The New York Times reported of one such example in late November about how an online eyewear retailer, based in New York, had purposefully been garnering online customer complaints in an attempt to appear higher in Google’s search results.

The article focused on a New York consumer who conducted a Google search for her favorite brand of eyeglasses, and at the top of the search page, just below Google’s paid advertisements, she found a company called DecorMyEyes.com. The consumer placed an order for a pair of designer eyeglass frames, and prescription contact lenses for a cost totaling several hundred dollars.

According to the Times article, the next day a representative from the company called the consumer saying they had run out of the merchandise she ordered, and told her she had to pick a different brand of contact lenses. The consumer told the Times that when she told the caller she wanted a refund, not different merchandise, he became rude and demanded she choose something else, and refused to give her a refund.

The article went on to detail how in her attempt to get her money back, the consumer was allegedly threatened repeatedly, sometimes with physical violence, by an employee of the company. The consumer told the Times the experience was “one of the most maddening and miserable experiences of her life.”

At first glance, you would think this was just a case of a dishonest company trying to cheat a consumer out of their money, but as it turned out the hostility towards the consumer was actually part of a calculated strategy. Not only was the company trying to avoid issuing a refund to the consumer, they were purposefully trying to get the consumer to write a negative complaint on one of the numerous online complaint boards.

DecorMyEyes.com’s strategy was simple. An online message board post, that the Times says was written by DecorMyEyes.com’s owner Vitaly Borker, says the company’s goal was to create negative buzz about the company all over the Internet, because the more online attention the company received, positive or negative, the higher the company would appear in Google’s search results, consequently channeling more unsuspecting consumers their way.

As it turns out, the New York consumer’s experience with DecorMyEyes.com was not unique; consumers on multiple Internet complaint boards reported similar experiences with the company. BBB serving Metropolitan New York has received 306 complaints against the company in the past three years, and 285 of those complaints have been left unanswered.

For consumers who research companies they find online, the complaints undoubtedly would have acted as more of a deterrent to doing business with DecorMyEyes.com. Unfortunately many do not, and companies like DecorMyEyes.com have been able to bully consumers out of their merchandise, and out of their money.

Fortunately this story has a positive ending for consumers and honest businesses everywhere. The week after the story ran in the Times, Google announced, in a blog post titled “Being bad to your customers is bad for business,” they were making significant changes to their search algorithm, so it will now detect “the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of merchants” that, in Google’s opinion, “provide an extremely poor user experience.”

The fact that Google acted so quickly to address the problem with their search algorithm to lock out less than honest companies indicates that even in the wide-open business landscape the Internet has created, ultimately, to do well financially, businesses still must do well by their customers.

Whether commerce is taking place online or at a traditional brick and mortar business, trust is absolutely necessary for a marketplace to function properly. Dishonest companies may be able to game the system for a while, but at the end of the day, businesses can only do well by doing good.

http://www.insidetucsonbusiness.com/news/small_business/article_ef8edc02-2369-56b0-ab25-01eb3bee956b.html