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Decor My Eyes Owner Vitaly Borker Bullied for Big Bucks

Decor My Eyes Owner Vitaly Borker Bullied for Big Bucks
Decor My Eyes Owner Vitaly Borker Bullied for Big Bucks
Report #: 64 - 4 Comments
Date Reported: Friday, March 18, 2011
Status: Past Incident
Severity: Low - Private Harassment
Primary Weapon: Email
Specific Location: Brooklyn - Sheepshead Bay
City/Local Area: New York City
State/Territory: New York
Region: United States

Decor My Eyes owner Vitaly Borker was busted on a long list of charges for treating his customers like crap to boost online sales because he knew treating people badly would increase his Google ranking with links to his website posted in bad reviews. That was of course until Borker bragged about it to the New York Times and Google under scrutiny decided to issue a manual penalty that devalued those links before ultimately allowing his competitors to overtake him on all competitive keywords not directly related to the domain name "DecorMyEyes". Borker's anti-customer service strategy was so unconscionable to most that it took international news headlines and lengthy explanations from Google as well as independent specialists in the search engine optimization (SEO) field to explain it in a way so that average people could understand how a constant stream of negative reviews nearly made Borker brilliant.


The problem all started with Google and a shady online merchant with a steady supply of designer glasses. Like most online merchants Borker realized that organic Google search results are the Holy Grail that drives online sales because once you are at the top you never have to buy AdWords ever again and consumers will assume that you are a reputable source because you are at the top of Google. For those of you who don't understand the previous sentence organic search results are the natural search results that are displayed for any given search while AdWords are the paid results that are shown on top and to the right of the natural results. Also like most merchants Borker realized that having relevant content alone was not good enough to beat the competition and that he would need as many editorial links to his site as possible to maximize online sales.


Unlike most merchants Borker was willing to do absolutely whatever it took to maximize links to his site no matter what laws he broke or how bad he made his brand look on the web. Even before Borker got arrested any Google search for "Decor My Eyes" yielded countless negative reviews that would cause most people to steer clear of his business without realizing how those horrible reviews were driving his business. They drove his business because a vast majority of those reviews that at times included negative consumer fraud awareness stories in the news media did not attack his primary tool for generating leads which was Google search results and most of those stories contained hyperlinks to Borker's website. As a result of the links most of which did not contain a rel="nofollow" attribute (an option invented by Google so webmasters can link to a site while telling Google not to use the link in its pagerank algorithm) Decor My Eyes would show up at the top of organic search results for competitive terms most commonly searched for by online shoppers. Those search results would typically show nothing but competing shopping sites with similar products, but no reviews of the site itself. As a result people would find his merchandise on Google and buy it without ever knowing about the shady Russian they were doing business with.


Tactics used by Borker to maximize negative reviews and quality backlinks included death threats to customers and credit card fraud by knowingly making false charges to their credit cars. Google also claimed to have improved its algorithm to better identify negative reviews, but experts agree that Google's automated "sentiment analysis" is largely ineffective.

Dead on Analysis of Borker SEO

 
3/18/2011 -

As someone who has worked in the search engine optimization (SEO) field professionally I find it hard to believe that Google's bot has the ability to distinguish a negative article from a positive one, but they can distinguish a bad review from a positive one. The basis for this conclusion is based both on current search engine results pages (SERPs) performance and past data mining experience. In data mining I would take sets of keywords and various texts, analyze them for trends, and create models based on those trends. One of my best works was a spam filter for email based on keywords....

3/18/2011 -

In the case of an article Google must rely on keyword density and make conclusions based on words associated with negative opinions in the text of whatever article is linking to a site. This may at first sound easy, but even though a negative article about a product looks negative to people it would look no different to a computer than a positive recommendation for a web page about a negative issue. For instance if an article says that site A is great because it hates site B for doing keyword, keyword, and keywords it does that article be falsely flagged as a negative recommendation...

3/18/2011 -

On the other hand if we are looking at product rating sites then you can identify numerical values within parts of pages in which one can program a bot to conclude that a bad value (ex: 1.5/5) is a bad review and discount links from that page. Unfortunately this could not prevent false positive reviews (ex: webmaster signs up for review site under fake name and recommends product) from being counted if it were not for the fact that Google typically discounts multiple links from the same domain which just means more sites need to be hit with bogus positive reviews.

3/18/2011 -

In the end it is impossible to program a computer to correctly identify good or bad reviews although most can be screen out mathematically. Eventually Google will need a human to review things to tell if they are good or not and even then it just the opinion of one person.


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