We’ve all heard the saying, “Any press is good press,” but few of us considered bad press an important aspect of internet marketing.
Here’s the story: A designer eyeglasses seller called DecorMyEyes (I’m not going to link to them) followed shady business practices with its customers, harassing them, overcharging them, and threatening lawsuits. As a result, the company was rewarded with high rankings on Google. How did this happen? Vitaly Borker, owner of DecorMyEyes, received so much bad press from reputable sources such as the New York Times and Bloomberg that Google rated him as having high levels of credibility.
A Google fellow, Amit Singhal, wrote, “We were horrified. I am here to tell you that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results.”
Although the business received complaints on numerous sites, these complaints were not increasing the site’s rankings; it was the media’s bad-press articles, which often linked to the site, that were driving the increased rankings.
This story does have a happy ending, but not for DecorMyEyes. The underhanded company dropped from their competitive first page ranking for ‘designer eyeglasses’ and is now ranked somewhere near the 14th page.
This doesn’t mean that harassing your customers should be the latest tactic in search engine optimization, as Google has altered their algorithm to weed out bad businesses. How they can do this is a mystery, but I suspect they are utilizing sites such as Yelp and The Better Business Bureau to qualify businesses. It wouldn’t surprise me if Google figured out a way to read star ratings on business-rating sites, but, unfortunately, the enigma that is the Google algorithm remains secret. This does not, however, affect strategies for mobile marketing and other internet marketing strategies.
We’d all love a link from The New York Times, as one such high-quality, high-authority link can skyrocket a site on SERPs, but this example shows us that there is no easy (evil) way to get into these sources. The best we can do (imho): continue to write quality content and press releases and hope the big-time media sources pick up on them.





