From the IndustryPace archive. Originally published December 2, 2010. Revisited October 2026.

Google Changes Its Algorithm to Fight Troll Marketing

An eyewear seller bragged that abusing customers helped his Google ranking. Five days later, Google changed the algorithm. He kept getting arrested.

By Pesach Lattin

The original text of this post was lost when IndustryPace went dark. This page keeps the original headline and date, rebuilds the subject from the public record, and says what happened next.

On November 26, 2010, The New York Times published David Segal's story on Vitaly Borker, who ran an eyewear site called DecorMyEyes. Customers described threats and abuse. Borker's theory, as reported, was that the complaints and angry reviews pointed links at his site and pushed him up Google's rankings. Bad publicity as SEO.

Google's response

On December 1, 2010, Google announced an algorithm change to demote merchants that give customers a bad experience, saying it affected that merchant and hundreds of others. It gave few details, citing the risk of people gaming it. It was a rare case of Google publicly changing search because of one newspaper story, and it was an admission that the ranking system had been rewarding exactly what the Times described.

What happened to Borker

Postal inspectors arrested him on December 6, 2010. In May 2011 he pleaded guilty to interstate threats, mail fraud and wire fraud, and in September 2012 he was sentenced to four years. He was released in 2015. In 2017 he was arrested again after reportedly returning to online eyewear, pleaded guilty and served more time. In 2022 he was arrested a third time over another eyewear site, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in 2023 and was sentenced to 30 months.

How it aged

Google still folds reputation and merchant quality into ranking, and the DecorMyEyes story is still the standard example of negative attention as a marketing tactic. The deeper lesson is about platforms: the algorithm was not broken, it was doing precisely what it was built to do, counting attention without asking what kind. That describes most of the ad business in 2026, too.

This page rebuilds a December 2010 IndustryPace post whose original text is not available. Facts come from The New York Times (November 2010), PCWorld on Google's announcement, Search Engine Land and public court records of Borker's convictions.