Will Google Stop Indexing Your Competing Website?
March 1, 2010 by Pablo Palatnik
In an article posted today in the New York Times titled, “It’s Not Just Microsoft Against Google,” an specific case is made against Google not indexing a vertical search engine in France called “Ejustice.fr.” This story is basically the story many people can literally go out of business from one day to another and shows us MOST OF US in the search industry rely on Google indexing our website in their search engine for SEO, if not, a lot of us would be pretty screwed.
This is NOT the first time we hear of this or that the New York Times covers a story regarding Google and their business practices regarding the indexing of websites. In September of 2008, I wrote a post on the New York times story, “New York Times Reports on PPC Arbitrage,” which also was a similar case of a website owner being un-indexed by Google for having a website which didn’t meet the Google guidelines because it was, in Googles opinion, an arbitrage based website only used for generating money from ads not giving any real value to searchers. Well…can’t we say the same about Business.com? A vertical search engine that basically runs Google Adsense to make all its money and if you really look at the business.com business model, it uses either Google Adsense or its own paid links to yield its results.
Should we be scared of Google? If we “compete” against Google or post ANY kind of threat which I dont see and believe sites such as Ejustice.fr pose any sort of threat, may that really be the reason for indexing? Is the do no evil really evil?
“Mr. Barella developed the site, including the search technology, with an investment of about €20,000, or $27,000, and help from a friend who is an engineer. Aside from a video interview in which an unsmiling Mr. Barella explains how Ejustice.fr works, the site is short on bells and whistles. Nonetheless, within a few months, it was attracting up to 20,000 visitors a day and selling a modest amount of advertising.
That, Mr. Barella says, is when the trouble with Google began.
Overnight, traffic plunged — because, Mr. Barella says, the company stopped indexing pages from Ejustice.fr for inclusion in Google’s search engine.
“We asked Google, ‘Why are you doing this? We have no more money,”’ Mr. Barella said. “They didn’t want to work with us, they didn’t want to help us, they didn’t want us to exist.”?
You can read the rest of the New York Times article @ ——-> It’s Not Just Microsoft Against Google
