Lawsuit Seeks Google Pagerank Secrets

Kinderstart.com has sued Google, trying to break through the walls of the castle high on the mountain over the Internet. The suit seeks damages for the loss in visitors, but pushes for even more � disclosure of Google's methods of ranking websites.

In the hunt for website traffic, page ranking is everything. The steady group of regular visitors is rarely sufficient to generate the numbers that generate revenue. Sites depend on visitors who find them on yahoo, MSNsearch, Ask, and the 800-pound gorilla, Google.

An entirely new industry has developed - search engine optimization - aimed at not just getting your site into the search engines, but to improve your "page ranking". The holy grail is to have your site turn up on the first page of results on a Google search. You can check the ranking of a site at sites like Googlerankings.com.

How Google ranks pages is a closely guarded secret. Google calls it an algorithm but one blogger calls it a "smoky back room." Requests to Google for information on why a site has dropped in its rankings will get responses worthy of Kafka. If you get more than a form letter, it will sound as if the Wizard of Oz himself is running the show. There are references to the nameless faceless algorithm that sees all, does all. Google's official description of its pagerank system says only that "Google's complex, automated methods make human tampering with our results extremely difficult."

Kinderstart got caught in the algorithmic storm. With its traffic buzzing along at a rate of 10 million a month, something caused its ranking to drop. Traffic dropped 70 percent and revenue dropped 80 percent.

After unsuccessfully facing the Google monolithic bureaucracy, it turned to another monolithic bureaucracy � the California court system. The suit seeks damages, information, and asks to be certified a class action. A class action would entitle every site that claims to have been dropped by Google to seek damages. It would also entitle Kinderstart's lawyer to large fees, which may be deserved if he could actually get Google to disclose their algorithm.

Complete article: http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/03/19/124124.php

[OldWelshGuy]

What a waste of time effort and money. HOW can these people sue google? They didn't Pay google anything, they don't have a contract with google, they have accepted the offer of free traffic from google, end of story.

This is a joke it really is. It is a pathetic attempt at getting some free publicity. And does not have a snowballs chance in hell of being won. The only winners here are the blood sucking lawyers.

if the law suit drags on long enough google may end up including more webmaster feedback systems. it'd be nice to see how google ould score your website before the next page rank, sort of a future page rank tool by google so they can say "hey, you were warned" ?

Am I the only one who's tiring of g00gle in the news?

[temi]

I tuned off the hyper hyped google long time ago

I'm doing the same as a gut reaction to all the g00gle this and g00gle that nonsense.

It is not google's fault that they get sued almost every week and that they are in the news because of this.

OWG is right. This is probably just a free publicity for this other company with some more visitors. Maybe they hope to find out something about the google ranking system. Something they will surely not achive. Anyway, the visits did not droped because of google.

I was courious so I checked this site. It has PR0. Lost of keywords with more that 50.000.000 results for each keyword. There are some over 1.000.000.000 results. One keyword is even spelled wrong. And it is a directory and search engine, which is not in shown in the keywords. Maybe these are the causes for the loss of visits.