Post date: September 5, 2010 by Neil Palmer
In a first time law suit in North America, Google has been accused of and will face an enquiry regarding business practices. Texas regulators have begun an ‘anti-trust’ review of Google’s advertising and search engine business practice. Although there has been previous investigations into the outcome of Google’s numerous acquisitions in recent times, this is the first broad scale investigation into the main activities of the search giant.
With any market leading company there will inevitably be questions raised, notably due to their buying power and market share giving them a competitive advantage that can be taken advantage of.
In the last 6 months there has been a large shift in the way that Google ranks websites in the results pages, and some of the larger corporation is suffering heavily after the latest updates.
Google fought back immediately with a statement from Don Harrison (Google deputy general council): “We are [often] asked about fairness with our search rankings- like why do some rank higher than others?”.
He went on to add to a comprehensive blog post about how they operate their search engine to provide informative and relevant results for the benefit of users, not website owners. He also noted that obviously some website operators would be less happy than others if their pages were demoted or sat lower than that of competitors.
The main reasons for the enquiry are three companies accusing Google of reducing their traffic by placing them lower on the SERP’s. SourceTool (TradeComet), myTriggers, and in the UK Foundem are all complaining about recent demotions. By pointing out that there are other large firms who are performing well, and others will naturally replace the sites that are not in the top places, there is obviously a win lose scenario depending on how Google adjusts their algorithms. The key factor he mentions is ‘quality service’ providers will [should] rank well.
Related posts
Last modified: September 27, 2011
