I looked for a legal remedy for the 302 redirect bug, but could not find one, mostly because of the argument that inclusion is not a right. Basically, the hijacked site would be dumped for duplicate content - their own, at that. DMCA? No, they weren't actually using the content, Google just thought it was. Non-inclusion or being dropped? Not a right, and Google makes the decision on any site. The only control on this, really, is public relations... Anti-competitive practices, or something along those lines? Nope, while most were spammy scraper directories running AdSense, there are plenty of examples of those that were not... and the subject of sites hijacked was not an issue, other than the money to be made from AdSense did dictate the subject for many of the hijacking sites, causing some industries to be hit harder (web hosting, real estate, lawyers). And in the end, linking absolutely seems to be the strongest defense against the bug, which is something any decent webmaster can do for his site, although modifying some scripts to avoid relative linking is a hassle and may be against TOS or copyright. Linking relatively is a method, just like 302 click tracking, older than Google, but to insure your site remains ranked in Google, you must disavow them. I don't see any merit in this lawsuit, other than the publicity of filing it... But we may not yet have all the information as to why they think they have a case.
They don't have a chance of winning. As everyone else has pointed out, being listed on Google, directories, websites, or any other search engines is always a privilege, and never a right unless you have some contractual agreement that states that a particular website must list you (and perhaps in a certain way). If Kinderstart were up in the top 10 for whatever keywords they wanted, someone else wouldn't be. I think this is obvious, and Kinderstart probably don't expect to win this. They probably expect to get a lot of extra traffic by doing this, though.
Found this article today on cnn.money.com. http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/18/technology/google_lawsuit.reut/index.htm This is interesting, I wonder if during discovery, if the lawsuit isnt thrown out prior, that they will uncover info about the algo? I wonder if they did any blackhat seo? Regardless, they don't have a leg to stand on.
WOW Interesting. I wonder if they will have to uncover the algorithm as well. Thanks for sharing this!
I really hope google wins. Financial damages? What for? At first they get all this traffic from google for free and then sue them. I doubt the algo will get uncovered though.
A search for their catch phrase: pulls up some interesting urls in Google: http://www.kidsafeid.com/partner_start.asp?partner=kinderstart I don't know what kinderstart.com looked like in March 2005, but I can see that this site could possibly cause rank problems... http://www.dejavu.org/cgi-bin/get.cgi?ver=95&url=http://www.kinderstart.com Because of the internal linking methods used by kinderstart.com, there are no images and none of the url's seem to work. Why this is in the index, I don't know; I have used http://www.dejavu.org/ in the past, and haven't seen a url like that before. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:www.kinderstart.com is interesting, there are url's that should be robot protected in the index. I wonder if they got caught in a 302 hijack, or a duplicate content penalty. I haven't got time right now to search out archive.org and see what was there in March 2005, which is the date mentioned in the cnn article.
Your correct they have NO change of winning. but this could be bad press for google and maybe, yes maybe the se's will take a more active role in why they ban sites or helping webmasters fix thier banned sites..
Not quite overnight. Drudge has been linking to them for months now. I didn't know he was drudge's assistant. I figured there was some connection after he stopped (essentially) linking to yahoo or google news and did breitbart instead.
Take a look at the alexa graph again. It was no slow rise to their position. It basically happened immediately. Look at the 1 year graph, they started at the same spot they hold now.
I see what you are looking at. I thought you meant overnight as in "recently" or the past month or something. I bet 90% of breitbart's traffic comes from drudge, if not more. It took him about 6 months to stick the google ads in there though, for a while, it ran without any ads (other than that top of page ad).
I'm sorry if this was already posted. I couldn't find it anywhere so I thought I would share. If a similiar thread was started, i apologize. Has anyone seen this article: http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=16187&hed=Google+Sued+over+Ranking§or=Industries&subsector=InternetAndServices
Fascinating! I don't think this case will go very far but it will be interesting to watch what happens.
Why does everything think of google as a right instead of a privilege? What did we do before google? lol.
Google is so wacked it gains income from our adsense type sites,then they say if a person searching get a site with ads on them it's not fair to visitor ? What? like bite the hand that feeds you ...
google is good but updating secreat rules every time is not nice, this days many companys are planning on google search.and nice info in site thanks