THE Lowly Peon

The Benefits of being an Ass

▼

29 November 2010, 2:01am

This creep decided to threaten and stalk his customers in order to generate bad press — but any press is good press, right? Because of all the scathing reviews, he comes up first in Google's results for many of the products he sells.

He stumbled upon the upside of rudeness by accident.

“I stopped caring,” he says, and for that he blames customers. They lied and changed their minds in ways that cost him money, he says, and at some point he started telling them off in the bluntest of terms. To his amazement, this seemed to better his standing in certain Google searches, which brought in more sales.

Before this discovery, he’d hired a search optimization company to burnish his site’s reputation by writing positive things about Dec0rMyEyes online. Odious behavior, he realized, worked much better, and it didn’t cost him a penny.

“Look,” he says, grabbing an iPad off a small table. He types “Christian Audigier,” the name of a French designer, and “glasses” into Google. Dec0rMyEyes pops up high on the first page.

“Why am I there?” he asks, sounding both peeved and amazed. “I don’t belong there. I actually outrank the designer’s own Web site.”