Google has added a new twist to its Page Rank algorithms to prevent businesses from turning bad reviews and negative comments into a workable business model. The change was sparked by the story of a Brooklyn-based online eyeglass seller that made a habit of threatening customers if they complained about shoddy service or being sent knockoff products. The negative comments about the site were somehow boosting its ranking to the top of many searches, but Google says its algorithmic changes can now detect merchants that "provide an extremely poor user experience" and reduce their search ranking accordingly.

The website DecorMyEyes was the subject of a recent New York Times exposé detailing the site owner's penchant for using foul language and thinly veiled threats to "deal" with customers who complained about poor service or poor quality products. Vitaly Borker noticed that the more people complained about his website online, the higher his ranking in Google searches rose and the more business he got.

"I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get," Borker taunted customers on the online customer service site Get Satisfaction. "My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement."

Unfortunately, the tactic—a bastardization of the old adage, "Any press is good press"—continued to prove successful. "I've exploited this opportunity because it works," Borker told NYT. "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?"

Though Borker may face legal ramifications for his actions, according the NYT, Google has taken matters into its own hands—at least where the website's rank in search results is concerned. While the company considered some obvious options, including hard coding a block for the specific site or attempting to leverage "sentiment analysis," ultimately a team of engineers devised an method to identify the worst customer service bad actors.

Though Google won't reveal the exact method it uses to do so—mostly out of fear that such sites might find a way to work around its detection scheme—it said that the method identifies DecorMyEyes and "hundreds" of other similarly caustic merchants. "The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result," wrote Google fellow Amit Singhal on the company's blog.