DecorMyEyes.com, a designer glasses website has adopted a “negative advertising strategy” in the hope that bad reviews will return better search results for the brand.

The New York Times has reported that the company gives their customers a bad experience in the hope that they will then write a review about the bad service online. By doing this DecorMyEyes.com managed to get their site to the top of the search rankings by being deliberately rude to customers and sparking complaints.

Vitly Borker, the founder and owner of DecorMyEyes.com, told the New York Times, “I’ve exploited this opportunity because it works. No matter where they post their negative comments, it helps my return on investment. So I decided, why not use that negativity to my advantage?”

Although Borker’s actions are extremely unethical, it does highlight a flaw in how Googles Pagerank system works. One of the main considerations given is how many incoming links a website has, this is why DecorMyEyes.com gets a high position in search results as many negative comments from disgruntled customers are posted across forums on the web.

After the New York Times published its story, a response was soon posted on Google’s Official Blog entitled “Being bad to your customers is bad for business.” According to Amit Singhal, the Google team have written a new algorithm that can detect which merchants have provided a bad experience to their customers.

“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.”

“Being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results,” Singhal added.

Of course, Google never provides much detail about its algorithms for fear that if it did, its search engine would become easily manipulated. Nevertheless, Singhal admitted that the new tweaks to the system detects merchants that provide their customers with “an extremely poor user experience” and then assigns them lower rankings.