Slashdot Mirror
Online Store to Sue Blogger Over Google Ranking?
An anonymous reader writes "An online business owner is threatening to sue blog owner Dean Hunt (DeanHunt.com) because he is upset that the blog owner is doing better than his business in the Google search rankings. After an initial threat, Dean received a follow-up threatening to take legal action against him. So far Dean has elected not to name and shame this business owner."
Yeah, well there are lots of blogs that do better than a number of businesses and organizations for whatever reasons Google assigns ranking. I get a number of amused emails from people that find Google ranks my blog higher than their dedicated sites for a shocking number of items. They want to know how I've engineered it, and I have to say I honestly don't know. But if they want to pay Google to increase their ranking above mine, go for it.
I suspect part of the reason is my selective use of links in articles I post to supplement the content I post with targeted information, as well as my hosting it from my office in an educational institution. Occasionally getting linked from places like Slashdot, BoingBoing and Digg can't hurt either....
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Who ever is doing this, I'll bet there's some stupid law they can leverage that says that Top Level Domains (TLDs) should only be used for what they stand for. Afterall, the
When I search for Dean Hunt, the blog beats any references to that lawyer's firm by a long shot but the links referring to the lawyer follow the blog immediately after it's #1 slot.
Anyone else find it hilarious that all these news articles are going to Google bomb the blog into a no-way-beatable #1 position for at least a few months? And what's this guy supposed to do? Check Google daily to ensure that he hasn't offended this ranking implication that the online store claims should be in place superseding Google's pagerank?
My work here is dung.
An undisclosed somebody is threatening to sue a poor little blogger over something. Come on. This is not news. Where are the facts?
It would be funny to duplicate the content and massively interlink sites to drop the business page ranking even worse. Does anyone know if this approach has been successfully attempted in the past?
Click here or here.
FRCP 12(b)(6) the thing. Plaintiff has not stated a claim upon which relief can be granted. Then you're done.
The lawsuit isn't needed anymore. By posting the story to /. as an anonymous coward, the store owner just blasted the bloggers website off the net. Now google'ers will bypass the downed blog website, and go on to the store.
Brilliant!
Now that deanhunt has been slashdotted, the bogus claimant can rejoice, for deanhunt no longer exists (at least for a few hours).
Put a little link at the top of his site saying "If you're looking for Texas lawyer .... click here (link)".
What's next? Students sued because they're more popular than the unpopular students? "Sally only won home coming queen because she's a cheerleader and promiscuous! It's UNFAIR!"
TV ad - Was your child devastated when she wasn't voted home coming queen? The law offices of Dewey Cheatum can help. We also provide Google ranking services.
A quite I heard:
Fighting on the internet is like the Special Olympics. Even if you win, you're still retarded.
While not necessarily the most tactful of quotes, it does ring true.
I am totally serious. My blog was SUED BY MICRO$OFT because I made some software that was so much more awesome then theirs. I even have the letters they sent me to prove it!!11!!! Now, if the Slashdot editors will kindly accept my claim without any sort of validation and post me on a Slashdot front page...
Seriously. Show an ounce of journalistic integrity and don't give a podium to utterly baseless claims. He doesn't even say what company is suing him so we can't even bother to ask that company if this is real. Any idiot could have made this up for the singular purpose of driving up hits. I am not saying that the guy is liar (he very well could be telling the truth), just he shouldn't get a free stage to advertise until there is at least the semblance of a claim that can be fact checked.
Wouldn't every body here want to see a blog by Mike Hunt?
Laugh. It's funny.
Okay, it isn't. It's tired and overused. And oddly enough, MikeHunt.com is safe for work. Whoddathunkit?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
On a site I run, I've got articles I've written about other businesses (typically complimentary) that invariably rank higher than the businesses' own web sites, especially on slightly odd-ball searches, but often on something as simple as the business's name. And the only thing I'm doing is using better grammar, and generally carrying on in a more conservative way. Google seems to reward restraint. Breathless promotional material always seems to take a back seat to lucid, well-constructed information.
Sure, Google ranks plenty of blatant trash higher than it sometimes should, but it's not always that way. My own experience is that actual, real content remains king. Small businesses frequently don't take the time to actually write any real meat for their own web sites. Hell, a lot my older stuff still isn't even all that standards-compliant (I swear I'll get around that CSS stuff one of these days), but it usually exceeds the sites about which I'm writing. And, of course, it's a feedback loop. The more credible some of my pages appear, the higher the new ones rank, too. No witchcraft, no magic sauce: just careful writing and resisting the urge to run content from the slimier ad engines.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
What's the point of suing the blogger? If Google is the one that creates the page rankings, and is the reason why that blog is ranked higher than his website, how is it the blogger's fault?
I'm sorry, sir, but we won't be needing you and your fancy rational thinking on the jury. Have a nice day!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Dear [edited]
Since your business [edited].com is doing rather well and top ranking is important to your business. Please transfer $[edited] in U.S. dollars to this [edited] account. When that happens I will gladly remove any and all references to [edited].com.
Thanks and bite me
I saw a link to this on his website: http://www.deanhunt.com/services/index.html
It raises some suspicion as this guy's business seems to be googlebombing. Perhaps he fabricated this story in order to get his website up in PageRank by people linking to him.
Yes great. He posts a truly funny e-mail exchange on his site. And now he even gets slashdot exposure.
He even wrote: I will make a viral campaign!
http://deanhunt.com/category/seo/
This is it and you have fallen for it. Stupidos.
To send letters like that. I have a feeling Mr. Dean Hunt is fabricating this story, as his business is mainly google bombing and search engine optimization.
See Misconfigured Webserver, Threats to Call FBI.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
No, offer him advertising space on your website, and threaten to add more websites above him on Google if he doesn't! Dean should tell him that he intends to play hardball, and will have Google strike his entry entirely if necessary.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
There is NO evidence this guy is telling the truth, but there is ALOT of evidence this guy is lying his ass off. Don't believe this Slashdot readers!
And I'll share it for free:
A rich internal link structure.
Blog software creates this by default, but you can do it manually. A recent website I was hired to optimize will illustrate this. The site is customSiliconeBracelets.com. When I was hired they were on the 30th page for their two desired phrases: Silicone Bracelets & Custom Silicone Bracelets. Now, they're number 1 in both of those.
To accomplish this, I did two main things:
1. Add a bunch of text. It's mostly nonsensical. It's not meant for human consumption. It's there for keyword density.
2. Add a shitload of intra-site links. Every keyword in that nonsensical text is linked to other pages in the site. If you tried to navigate the site by following such links (instead of using the sites navigation) you'd go in circles for hours. Which, when you look at the logs, is essentially what Googlebot does.
Of course, there was all the "standard" stuff like page titles, H tags, links with titles, alt text on images, etc. But those only get you so far. The real beef is in the link structures, friends.
This seems *very* suspicious. Parent quotes from this post.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Is this not in fact the Viral Campaign he talks about starting on his blog? Seems to be working, since he's on Slashdot already, plus all the links go to his site and none to the other (ostensibly undisclosed) address.
This man owns a search optimization business
Nice catch, Sir Homer.
Here's where he tells us he's going to mount a viral campaign.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Just to reiterate what someone else tracked down in hopes of getting this (wholly ambiguous and suspect to begin with) story checked out:
http://deanhunt.com/category/seo/
Basically this guy has a side job of helping companies up their pageranks, and made all this up as an "experiment in viral marketing". Nothing to see here...and sure explains why he's keeping the company name and search terms secret.
The person doing the suing is totally misguided and obviously trying to extort money through fear rather than having an actual case.
How could someone sue another site owner over his google ranking? He has no control over how google rank his site, unless he paid google, which is perfectly legal anyway. At least they should be suing google, but probably decided they'd be destined to lose.
Anyway google don't hide the fact that they sell search ranking order as a product/service.
My online identity of nearly 10 years (Bones3D) is probably starting to look awfully tasty to some enterprising 3D modeling/animation software developer, since it sounds like it'd be a high end inverse kinematics system of some sort. In my case though, it's more of an amalgam of a high school nickname and the field I was trained in several years later. So the two parts are virtually unrelated.
Another fun one, would be my real name itself (James Meade), which actually is a popular clothing manufacturer out in the U.K., similar to what Levi Strauss is here in the U.S. I'm not real worried about them though, since I rarely use my real name online more than I have to.
At any rate, it helps to be aware of how your identity could be taken out of it's original context and used for commercial purposes.
Needless to say, it does bring up an important question... how much is your online identity worth to you? And on what terms would you be willing to part with it?
8==8 Bones 8==8
I've grown to learn that when people make a point to let you know they're "honestly" doing somthing, or "genuinely" feeling some way, they're full of shit.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
This newly-created account is Dean Hunt!! Read his posts. They're subtle attempts to get people to link to the story, as well as convince them it's not a hoax. Another Slashdotter figured this out, and I completely agree.
You, sir, are a scum-bag loser.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
1) Anybody who runs a website with a reasonable number of users gets shit-loads of this sortof email every day. You ignore it and just accept that the world is full of nuts and we've allowed them to send emails
2) This guy is quite clearly interested in fiddling with Google rankings - indulging him by linking and quoting his blog is really really not very helpful.
Oh my, if you hover over the people's names who have submitted responses, seems like each person's web site that the name links to is a business. I tried to submit a response, but it was rejected! He's a sneaky devil. That is how those sites are getting higher rankings, his blog links to their sites through the fake comments.
mr pibb + red vines = crazy delicious
but the same thing has happened to me (not the suing part though) my blog rating is higher than the actual resturaunt I was reviewing
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Because it's business? That says more than I ever could about the "royal" mentality that many people seem to have. And in all this time, I has presumed a certain level of snobbery was all in my imagination! You know, that "Us vs. Them" feeling we all get? I'm definitely on the "less successful" side of the "Us vs. Them" fence.
But for this business professional to actually come out and SAY what I had always suspected they believe is just... I don't know the word for it... unsettling in a way. I guess it's because I also believe there is a lot more that goes unsaid. So like cockroaches, if you see one, there's probably thousands. If they'll say this and believe it, there's probably a LOT worse going on in his head.
I commented that maybe he made it up and linked to his own blog entry. My comment was waiting for moderation for a few minutes before dissapearing. looks like it really is made up.
Could there be a remote possibility that bloggers now start inventing stories to attract more clicks?
An entry for wicktionary:
deanhunt
It looks like this is turning into a cautionary tale for would-be advertising gurus: just becoming widely known is not enough; you need to very much avoid becoming widely known as a laughingstock.
I think it's HILARIOUS that you equate SEO with stealing, fraud, price fixing, insider trading and war profiteering. It says a lot to me about your personal values system and your judgment.
I have many thoughts on this.
1)
You're not deriding the entire software development profession just because some people create spyware, are you? Of course not. You pay your bills writing software. You think it 'contributes to the overall happiness of mankind' or some such thing.
But you're quick to judge the entire SEO industry because of the part of that industry that does things like spam your forum.
Do you see the hypocrisy there?
2)
The only harm you've listed is inconvenience to you. You have to clean up spam in an online message board. You have to read thru "SEO Gibberish" Excuse me if I don't cry a river for you. An inconvenience does not a "detriment to society" make. Commericals are inconvenient but are you going around telling producers that you hate them?
What's more, these are things you CHOSE to do. You chose to operate a website open to the public. Further, you chose to clean up spam as it happens. You chose not to implement heuristic or Bayesian filtering of comments (you're a developer after all. bayesian filtering is easy.), You chose not to implement a Captcha during sign-up or login. You chose to actually read "SEO Giberish" instead of just moving to the next site on the list. Your choices. Your hand is not being forced.
3)
There's a phrase you may or may not be familer with. If you aren't, look it up: "there is no universal truth"
4)
Getting 'bad search results' is Googles fault, Not website owners.
5)
When a business closes one branch and opens another in the big economic center of a city--as in my mall example--this isn't considered 'gaming the system.' It's considered GOOD BUSINESS. Similarily, optimizing your site for it's location is not "gaming" anything. It's playing inside the rules, and it's GOOD BUSINESS.
6)
If you think that this world is one of moral absolutes, where things are "Net Good" or "Net Bad" is silly and immature. It just is. I'm not trying to attack you personally, I'm just being honest. Capitalism, for all its ugliness, is the reason that America is what it is today. Capitalism is *good*. How about this for your moral relativism: By doing SEO, I'm making a business more profitable. This in turn means that they're hiring more people. Paying more wages. Those wages are feeding children and putting braces on their teeth and clothes on their backs.
7)
SEO is only necessary because of the power of Google. They are creating a search monopoly. They are becomming one of the most poweful corporations on the planet. Yet you fail to wax poetic about the moral and ethical implications of what Google is doing. They can change their algo and a businesses sales can plummet. People get laid off. People go hungry. They cry. They stay up late worrying. They are harmed. Where is your crusade against that? Where is your crusade against the growing power of Google?
8)
Google lays out a list of rules. If you play inside those rules you're not doing anything wrong. Period.
9)
People that spam their links are stupid because that really doesn't boost your ranking. In fact, it can seriously harm your ranking. If backlinks fluctuate too wildly, your site is penalized.
10)
What is your "total contribution to the happiness of mankind?" How would you begin to measure that? Do you know what? The website I linked to in the beginning--just one of many that's hired me--sells mostly to non profits. They raised hundreds of thousands--possibly millions--of dollars for victims of Hurricane Katrina and the Boxing Day Tsunami. Schools and non-profits all over the country have funded things like school camp and toys for tots and make-a-wish thru products purchased thru the SEO'd website. How do you measure that?
The honest truth is that you cannot. You have a black and white mind in a gray world.
Before I complete any SEO contract I submit the site to Googles review team. If it gets banned, I do what I need to do to fix it. Usually it's just a 30 or 90 day ban at first and they'll unban you if you fix the problem that caused the ban.
If it doesn't get banned within 45 days after submission, they pay the remaining part of the contract and it's considered complete.
So far, 15-or-so websites later, I've *never* has a website banned.
All you need to do is follow their webmaster guidelines, as I've already said.
All this talk of "gaming the system" by people who seem to not understand the "rules of the game."
He did a really good job of it. A scan of his last couple months of posts show that on average he gets about 3-5 comments per post (if he's lucky). With this google search term fiasco, he's been getting dozens of comments per post, the highest so far being 158 on one post alone.
Mission accomplished??
It's a needless waste of natural resources, trees and oil come to mind immediately but there must be others. It does nothing but cause me frustration and increase waste. And you can be sure the junk mailers aren't contributing to even the financial costs of landfill space, let alone the environmental costs of their actions. It is a "tragedy of the commons" situation.
As for "job creation" -- so would roving bands of rock throwing hoodlums. Think of all the glass companies and installers that would employ. Now, breaking people's windows is illegal because it wrongfully deprives the window owners of their personal resources. The distinction with junk mail is that sadly, junk mail is still legal because people haven't figured out that junk mailers are wrongfully depriving us of our resources (money to clean up after the bastards, and environmental destruction to make the crap). So from a moral rather than legal perspective, where "moral" includes the notion that depriving people of their personal resources is wrong, junk mail is just as immoral as property damage. It's just sadly legal.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
And maybe some (not all) blogs should be ranked higher because more people find what they say about those businesses more interesting and useful than what those businesses say about themselves.
If I want to find contact information and other objective information (menus, product/price lists) for the business then I'll try their website first, but if I'm wondering whether to do business with them, frankly their website is secondary.
Even if I'm looking for docs on a particular product I don't bother with starting from their website, I start with google - most corporate website search engines are crap - for example you get lots of useless PR releases bullshit instead of actual tech specs or drivers. They should just put all their pages in plain HTML where search engines can index them. But I guess someone has to waste lots of company money on paying expensive "web designers" to charge megabucks just to create all that crap and slap on a useless search engine.
I mean who cares what "Divinci's Pizza" says about their pizza? Who even cares about Divinci's pictures of their pizza? A blogger's recent opinion and pictures of their pizzas, restaurant etc would be far more interesting for someone trying to figure out whether Divinci is worth a try.
If Google starts to rank businesses higher just because businesses pay them AND[1] Google's searches become less useful to me, I'll just switch search engines. Same goes if it's bloggers or whoever else instead.
[1] If McDonald's wants to pay 10 million USD to Google a year just to be top ranked for "McDonald's Corporation" go ahead - I don't think it will make my search results less useful.
How about these?
asshole
shithead