> 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).

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.

And that's assuming he isn't selling fake designer frames, which would have a lot higher margin. Either way he's pulling in quite a lot of cash.

"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.

Get Satisfaction is objecting to sleazy but successful tactics to draw undeserved attention?

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

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

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.

Yes. Far too lightweight for the background. Hurt my eyes.

+1 for iReader. I had to use it too. I find myself using it surprisingly often, even in this day and age, and even on some UX-savvy websites who should clearly know better.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

Your wish is their command: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-cus...

So now it's all Google's fault!

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

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.

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

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.

Rated 'F' by the Better Business Bureau.

http://www.bbb.org/new-york-city/business-reviews/sunglasses...

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.

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

[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

I agree that the site looks extremely shady. But that doesn't mean unsuspecting people deserve to get harassed by that asshole. I think we take for granted how well versed we are on the internet and how relatively new the concept is of buying things online. Many, many internet users still aren't accustomed to the tricks of trolls and often click on the first thing they see on Google b/c they assume they're getting things from a place that everyone else talks about (presumably because it's at the top of a Google search).

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

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.

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

Amazing, cool to see you here D.

That was a great and satisfying response.