It's an SEO practitioner's nightmare story: someone manages to exploit Google in a way that discredits the integrity of search engine optimisation as a service agency to provide their clients. The exploit, in this case, came from a website called DecorMyEyes — and it's worth reading the full account: "A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web", by David Segal for the New York Times. Reporter David Segal deserves real credit here for not linking directly to DecorMyEyes, which would have handed the site exactly the "link juice" it was so aggressively chasing.
The DecorMyEyes Story
What makes the story remarkable is its implications. The man behind DecorMyEyes made real money out of being deliberately, aggressively unpleasant to his own customers. Every time someone complained about his store on sites like Get Satisfaction and linked to his site while doing so, it added to DecorMyEyes' page rank. His approach to negative advertising was so effective that Google searches for the sunglasses brands he sold returned to his store above the official brand websites themselves.
Why Google Doesn't Penalise This
At the time, Google offered no safeguard against this kind of negative-advertising exploit. The reasoning: building "sentiment analysis" into the search algorithm risks severely penalising sites like WhiteHouse.gov purely for attracting negative sentiment toward a current or future administration — a political actor shouldn't be punished in search rankings just for being controversial.
A Possible Fix: Customer Reviews
As the original article points out, there's a workaround that avoids that political trap entirely: applying customer reviews to online stores and services; the same way reviews already exist for their brick-and-mortar equivalents. That approach targets the actual signal (customer experience) without requiring a blunt sentiment filter across all of search.
Why This Stays Rare
Thankfully, engaging in negative advertising as a growth strategy is rare — mostly because it's cripplingly time-consuming to manage that volume of complaints simultaneously. But the underlying lesson holds regardless: if Google's end goal is to serve its users well, the best long-term approach for any SEO practitioner is to support that same objective. That's the only strategy that's actually future proof.
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