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Suing Google Over Pagerank
Yardboy wrote in to tell us about a story from Reuters describing a lawsuit by parental advice company Kinderstart.com against Google for 'charging it unfairly deprived the company of customers by downgrading its search-result ranking without reason or warning.' Kinderssart claims Google is responsible for 'a "cataclysmic" 70 percent fall in its audience -- and a resulting 80 percent decline in revenue.' I guess the courts will now decide: Can google taketh what they giveth?
They have been astroturfing all over the place and I don't see any actual content pages.
They advertise themselves as a search engine.
Google still indexes over 25000 pages by them, and from my initial examination, theres no content.
They appear to be just a linkfarm
Google aren't wrong, this kind of thing is what we have been asking them to do for ages (clear out the crap)
liqbase
They have since cleaned up their site . . . but they were using every type of outmoded, pseudo seo hacks - alt tag spamming, invisible #FFFFFF links at the bottom of their pages pointing to keyword spam duplicate pages ad nauseum
So don't whine if you get back slapped
For the lazy, the link to the website whose design truely sucks.
If I wanted to find some information on what they do it would be tough navigating through that. Good website design skills: provide information as quickly as possible, seem to have been misplaced.
But they don't really do anything, other than linking other sites. They're a link site, plain and simple. Probably harvesting click through revenue and add little value to the internet. And on a wild guess here, since a year ago, using the same search parameters, I have had many less 'link sites' coming up in Google searches which I see as only a good thing. Ironically they may well find the sites they link to through Google.
SearchKing sued Google over the same thing a couple of years ago, and lost the suit. The judge's comment was:
KinderStart will lose. Case closed.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The PageRank algorithm is patented (patent 6,285,999) and public.
But Google's results are much more than page rank. It also involves other algorithms relating to the search keys for a particular search. And there are tuning factors to the particular PageRank implementation. Google's proprietary tweaks keep ahead of the people who try to artificially inflate their page rank (like, apparently, these guys). Those are secret, and search engine optimizers would dearly love to know them so that they could fake out Google.
Looks like a human being (at google) checked the site. I just did too, and found absolutely no meaningful content on it whatsoever. In fact, every link I clicked took me to some place where I could spend money, thus compensating kinderstart for the referral.
:)
This is known as a "clicktrap" and (imho) is the most annoying thing in the world to happen upon.
People use Google because your chances of finding what you want, quickly are good. I.e. being taken directly to the "end of the line" , either right to a store itself, or to an article, or something else related to your search. Not to one of the stupid internet polluting man in the middle wastes of disk space.
You can go to a site like shitlance and pay someone from India a few hundred bucks to arrange hundreds of lasting (and good) backlinks. Search that site for "SEO" and you'll see what I mean.
Off my soapbox
Mod Parent (-1, Wrong)
No, Google is a public company. You see there's this obscure institution called the "stock market"...
No, Google offered some shares to be exchanged on a particular market, making them a publically traded company, but they are in fact, a private entity all the same. In this short review of high school level Social Studies, the public sector is the Government, and the private sector is everything else. The unrelated term "publically traded" simply means that there are no buyer restrictions on who may own or trade their stocks. There is such a thing as stocks that are not publically traded as well.
Regardless of the trading of their stock certificates in the marketplace, Google does not gain some new requirement to rank companies/sites according to anyone elses wishes on how they should be ranked.
~Rebecca
Google is a competitor is it not? If you visit http://www.kinderstart.com you will see that it offers itself as a search engine.
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I think Google should sue them though. If I type "google" into their search engine all I get is:
Home : Search Results
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Results for 'google' (0 matches found).
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