Caveat emptor!
The NY Times published a story on Black Friday about an online merchant and marketing genius from Bizarro World.
The proprietor, a Mr. Vitaly Borker, a Russian-born businessman living in Brooklyn, sells eyeglasses online. He has hit on a method that just about guarantees his company will be among the highest ranked sites in a Google search for designer eyeglasses: namely, bad publicity from unhappy customers.
You see, no one knows for sure, because Google’s methods for calculating page-rankings is a highly guarded trade secret, but it seems that the more mentions and links a company receives from a reputable Web site — good or bad — the higher is that company’s ranking.
Mr. Borker intentionally exploits this angle. Yes, you read that correctly. The more people that publish bad reviews online, in some cases scathingly bad reviews, the more business is driven his way.
Here, in his own words, he sizes up his retail kingdom:
“When I fly to Las Vegas I look down and see all these houses,” he starts. “If someone in one of those houses buys from DecorMyEyes and ends up hating the company, it doesn’t matter. All those other houses are filled with people, too, and they will come knocking.”
Mr. Borker encourages these bad reviews — I must stress, allegedly — by pulling the old bait-and-switch, badgering people who ask for refunds, and, in some cases, by going so far as to intimate physical violence.
After reading the article, I decided to perform the following search on Google: designer eyewear Cartier. Sure enough, www.decormyeyes.com — “you won’t find a better price” — was at the top of the results page, highlighted in the Ads section.
Happy Holidays, shoppers!
