A Lesson from the DecorMyEyes Google Products Ranking Debacle

When Ms. Rodriguez reported her shocking online shopping experience to the New York Times, Google immediately took action to create an algorithmic solution so this type of incident wouldn’t happen again in Google’s search results. After being initially scammed, then harassed and threatened by the owner of a website called, “DecorMyEyes,” Ms. Rodriguez went to the police. She later found this statement issued by website owner Vitaly Borker, “I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.” Borker discovered a loophole in the Google Products ranking algorithm, where essentially the quantity, not quality of reviews helped push a website’s product listing to the top. DecorMyEyes was feeding off of its abundant negative reviews to achieve higher rankings.

Google’s response – “being bad to customers is bad for business on Google.” Google quickly implemented a change in the search algorithm that analyzes the sentiment of the reviews in ranking the listings on Google Products. Let this be a lesson to all website owners that being disloyal to customers never works. Make sure your company is responding to comments online and effectively managing your social reputation because not all publicity is good publicity. For more information on brand reputation management, contact your SEO team.