Web Merchant Finally Punished for Negative Reviews

The New York Times recently ran an article about an online eyewear company that has been using the publicity caused by disturbing and sometimes abusive customer service behavior to gain search engine rankings. It is an unfortunate side effect of the way search engine rankings work that giving a company a bad review creates an additional link to that site for any terms that you use in the review, which can increase their rankings for those keywords.  One review is unlikely to cause a huge change, but a lot of them can start to add up.

This particular company is run by an individual who sells designer eye-wear through his website.  Sometimes, he sends his customers the frames they order and the transaction goes well, but sometimes the glasses customers get are counterfeit, or damaged, or they never arrive at all.  The customers in these transactions complain, and frequently call their credit card companies and try to dispute the charges.  In these cases, he uses phone calls and emails to harass them and try to frighten them into dropping their disputes.  His behavior has resulted in his company being banned from MasterCard at least once, and several eBay merchants have tried to block him as well. However, a MasterCard ban is only temporary, and he simply creates new eBay accounts to get around being blocked by a seller.

 

Someone like this surely gets a lot of negative online feedback, right?  Well yes, actually that's part of the problem.  Customers and merchants have left so many scathing complaints on different online forums that at the time of the article, his website had 1st position ranking for keywords like “designer eyewear” and the names of several major brands.  When users searched for these terms, they wouldn't see the negative reviews.  They just saw that he had the top listing.  This unfortunately provided him with enough traffic to make a lot of sales.

 

These kinds of unethical SEO tactics might have a temporary effect, but they do eventually fail.  In this case, because of the New York Times article, Google caught on to what this particular merchant was doing.  They released a blog post on December 1st saying that they were updating their algorithm to detect him as well as about 100 other merchants that they've flagged for customer service violations and prevent them from being listed in search results.  Now he still shows up if you search for his company name, but not if you search for “designer eyewear” or any of the other brand name keywords.  They are also considering displaying user reviews and ratings alongside search results for online merchants, much like they do for local brick & mortar stores. This may be part of answering the remaining question of what happens when new companies try to use these same tactics, or for that matter, if those same few offenders decide to start over with a new company name and a new website.