Poor customer service can boost search engine rankings

DecorMyEyes, an online retailer of contact lenses and glasses stumbled across a unique way of boosting their Google rankings.  The New York times story explains that due to their poor customer service, DecorMyEyes received a large amount of negative customer reviews on Get Satisfaction, ComplaintsBoard.com, ConsumerAffairs.com and other similar sites.

However, the Google algorithm only saw a hive of activity and due to its lack of sentiment analysis, perceived this 'social buzz' as a positive thing.  As the poor reviews increased, the website rose higher and higher for a number of very competitive keywords and phrases.

In one cheeky response to the criticism on the Get Satisfaction site the owner posted:

“I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.” 

Now that Google have heard about the controversy, the site has disappeared from the search results.  Google employee Amit Singhal is part of the team convened to look at the issue, he said:

"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."