An Internet directory of resources for parents has filed suit against Google for downgrading its placement on search results pages without reason or warning and thus costing the site visitors.
The civil lawsuit by KinderStart.com, filed on Friday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, seeks financial damages and asks Google to produce the details of its system for ranking the relevance of Web sites in response to a user search.
KinderStart charges that in March 2005 Google changed its ranking under the Google PageRank measurement, a tool the company uses to evaluate the value and authority of a Web page in terms of a specific keyword. When a user searches on that term, pages with a higher rank are posted first in the results page. Studies have suggested that the first few positions on a results page get many more visits that the links a searcher must scroll down to see.
In KinderStart’s case, the company maintains that the change in its Google PageRank caused a 70% decline in traffic and an 80% drop in the revenue earned from ads placed on its pages.
The suit holds that Google violated KinderStart’s constitutional right to free speech by blocking its Web content and other communications. The company also says that Google was not forthcoming about why its Web pages were downgraded or about ways to regain its improved ranking. “Google does not generally inform Web sites that they have been penalized nor does it explain in detail why the Web site was penalized,” the filing said.
A check of the Google index over the weekend found that while some pages from the KinderStart Web site were indexed on the first results page for the company name, the company’s home page was not in the first five results pages, although the Web site for an unrelated British company with the same name was. Both Yahoo! and MSN Search produced the KinderStart home page as the top-ranked result.
The first KinderStart page to appear in Google results has a PageRank of 3 out of 10. The KinderStart home page and many of its other pages earn PageRanks of 0. When Google drops a Web site from its index and then re-includes it, the pages are often reset to a PageRank of zero and left to build their rankings as user behavior indicates that their content is useful.
A 2002 lawsuit by a Web hosting and ad network claimed Google unfairly demoted its PageRank and asked a federal court to restore its ranking and charge Google for damages. The judge dismissed the case, saying that PageRanks represent Google’s opinions about a site and therefore can’t be proven wrong.
At press time Google has not issued a response to the lawsuit, filed late Friday. But the company has long maintained that revealing too much detail about any parts of its search algorithm, including how it ranks the results it finds, would lead Web optimizers to try to beat Google’s safeguards and hurt the search experience for its users.
Search industry observers were quickly prepared to offer their own opinions of the merits of KinderStart’s case, most of them negative. Andrew Goodman, founder and principal of saerch marketing firm Page Zero Media, wrote on the Traffick.com blog that KinderStart does not have a constitutional right to free advertising. “In the Yellow Pages, they drop you if you don’t pay,” his post read. “KinderStart should be sending thank-you notes to Google for all those years’ worth of unpaid leads they’ve enjoyed to this point.”
Andy Beal, president and CEO of Interactive marketing firm Fortune Interactive, wrote that “KinderStart should take the money they’re going to waste on suing Google and spend it on AdWords [paid search ads on Google] instead.” But he admitted that “there should be a clearer way for penalized sites to address why Google has stripped their PageRank”, for example a list of infractions.
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