

Get Satisfaction responds to NYTimes' DecorMyEyes Article - wallflower
http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2010/11/28/when-businesses-attack-their-customers/

======
Encosia
> It is not until the last page of an EIGHT page article that it becomes clear
> that Mr. Borker is quite troubled financially. This is no formula for
> success.

> He won’t get specific about his annual income, but he tallies the business
> from the day before: 120 orders, gross revenue of roughly $20,000, which
> yielded perhaps $3,000 in profit, out of which he had to pay his employees —
> mostly women who answer phones and e-mail, off-site — and advertising.

Even if he's paying those order-takers lavishly (unlikely) and his site-
related expenses are exorbitant, he should still be clearing at least 2/3 of
that. He won't be buying a private island any time soon, but a one-man company
turning a ~$2,000/day profit from home isn't exactly what I'd call
_financially_ troubled (though this may end badly for him otherwise).

~~~
MJR
It's also assuming that he's telling the truth. From someone who is clearly
not trustworthy, I seriously doubt those are his actual financials.

------
InfinityX0
"Like any online community that cares to combat spammers, we code our user-
submitted links so that Google ignores them for the purposes of calculating
page rank (specifically, we attach “rel=nofollow” to anchor tags). Somebody
trying to gin up their Page Rank by encouraging complaints on Get Satisfaction
would be sorely disappointed."

Uhm.. their links ARE dofollow. Do a quick CTRL+U and then search for "home"
and "contact". They both clearly say "Hey, Google, come check me out. The
water's fine."

<http://getsatisfaction.com/decormyeyescom>

EDIT: I see that their reviews are nofollowed, but most of the linkjuice has
already been passed by the site in these sidebar links. Additional boost isn't
supplied by negative reviews, no, but it is in businesses best interest to
submit here so that they can get that linkjuice push.

------
prodigal_erik
_Get Satisfaction_ is objecting to sleazy but successful tactics to draw
undeserved attention?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=540540>

------
brianwillis
Did anyone else find that typeface completely unreadable? Without iReader, I
wouldn't have bothered with the article.

~~~
nborgo
I feel like people who use such a light weight for body text care more about
the chunk of text "looking good" instead of actually being, you know,
_readable_. Especially on a dull yellow.

Hardly a good attitude for a blog.

------
chrisaycock
Here are the original HN discussions for anyone curious what this is about:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945112>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1946085>

------
rapind
I applaud the use of rel="nofollow". The New York Times article seemed to
blame both Get Satisfaction and Google, at least in the beginning, and that's
ridiculous.

~~~
ajays
I just looked at their page, and both the "contact us" and "home" links don't
have "nofollow" in them.

~~~
Natsu
Why would they need to put nofollow on links to their own site?

~~~
getsat
He's referring to this: <http://i.imgur.com/KqMcq.png>

From here: <http://getsatisfaction.com/decormyeyescom>

Despite what the blog entry says, they ARE contributing to the problem.

~~~
Natsu
I see, so they missed a few links. It appears to have been fixed now, though,
because I can no longer find that HTML on the page.

I wonder if Google will ever be smart enough to take ranking highly for
searches like "scam" or "fraud" into account (without penalizing the people
exposing scams and frauds) when computing someone's pagerank?

~~~
getsat
Your wish is their command: [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/being-bad-
to-your-cus...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-
customers-is-bad-for.html)

------
nostromo
I've previously heard some SEO folks say that nofollow may still play some
part in rank, however diminished. What's the consensus?

------
aboodman
And yet, he is still a top search result somehow. I wonder if other forums are
not being as dilligent with rel=nofollow, other legit factors are helping his
ranking, or if it's all seo.

~~~
jrockway
Maybe Google doesn't actually use "rel=nofollow" the way they say they do.

------
qeorge
If Mr. Borker is threatening and defrauding his customers, as he clearly seems
to be doing, this is a matter for the authorities. They should have no trouble
shutting down his business and website.

The SEO aspect is interesting, but rel="nofollow" is not the way to solve
this, nor is it Google's job to do so. That said, kudos to GetSatisfaction for
their diligence.

------
po
Rated 'F' by the Better Business Bureau.

[http://www.bbb.org/new-york-city/business-
reviews/sunglasses...](http://www.bbb.org/new-york-city/business-
reviews/sunglasses/decor-my-eyes-in-brooklyn-ny-95085/)

------
supershazwi
Doesn't this blog post further increase the negative advertisement for
DecorMyEyes? I'm sure there are still many people out there oblivious to this.

------
sandaru1
This makes me think, we need a new rel value "negative".

~~~
yv
[a rel="negative"]the competition[/a]

rel=nofollow works because websites want discourage SEO spam, not because they
want to spend their R&D resources on helping Google

------
sandGorgon
hmm - I wonder what would happen if this was brought to the attention of 4chan
?

------
klbarry
I do basic SEO as part of my job, so I know a few basic tools that can look
through this. Google keyword checker gives 590 searches a month for that
phrase, so it's not too competitive. I'm sure he ranks for a lot of these tail
phrases though.

A lot of his juice comes from every page on his site linking with good anchor
text to every other page (seems to be over 10,000 according to Yahoo Site
Explorer). The fact that he ranks so low (on my Google he's number 6 or so)
even with this on such an easy term shows something, doesn't it?

There's another massive site that links to him with anchor text a lot too.
It's hard to even find any of these criticism backlinks in there: it's
entirely possible these critics don't count at all anyway. After all, it seems
to be just a theory of the store owner.

~~~
ddemchuk
looks like we're crossing paths on another internet community :)

~~~
klbarry
Amazing, cool to see you here D.

------
klbarry
That was a great and satisfying response.

