According to Fortune.com the Texas Attorney General Office is investigating whether Google is “manual overriding or altering” search result rankings.
As part of the investigation the Texas AG demanded that Google turn over a broad range of internal documents as part of an antitrust review including its formula for determining advertising rates.
State investigators also are investigating complaints of Bing and Yahoo about purchasing ads on Google.
This comes just a couple of weeks after SearchEngineland.com reported Bing might be copying some of Google’s search results and story they wrote about on the 1st of February and later modified after a response from Bing on February 4th.
As Bing starts gaining on Google it seems like things are going to heat up even more.
Is google evil?
I have strong suspicion that google manually (or automatically) takes out domains/websites that get lots of traffic.
It has happened to me many times.
I ‘think’ google does it so that if they cut traffic to your site, then you are forced to buy ads from them in order to keep getting the same level of traffic.
It is sickening that google can do this…….and even more sickening is that people are not protesting about it openly, perhaps for fear of revenge from google.
Again, these are just my suspicions based on what I have experienced/seen.
I’ve always said this from years and I believe that the Google SE is “programmable”
the only way to avoid this is to force Google to reveal its SE algorithms
I agree with RKB 100%.
Also, many of these algorithm updates I suspect are designed for this purpose also, among other things.
If it becomes near impossible to rank anymore then they know businesses will throw their hands up in the air in frustration and pay for ads. After all, if you are a serious business, it is imperative you have Net traffic one way or the other.
I think a big backlash is coming in the next two to four years against Google as companies decide to shuck them and try other alternatives.
I am not sure an AG can tell google how to do business – whether their algoythm is organic typins, SEO “typins”, intuitiveness of the domain name, tld, age of domain, length of time in SEO – if you dont like the way they do business then go somewhere else.
Look at it from Google’s perspective – lets say there are 100 very good accident lawyers in a town – well no matter what SEO efforts and games are played 90 wont make it to the first page.
So it is really a situation of too many businesses competing for a very little free ad space.
End result – this brings the value of intutive generic. com’s even higher
Goodgle is like yelp, they want you to pay for something that you cannot control.
I honestly think the Eurozone is out to get them , imagine able to take a look inside their business practices , most peopeel expect this investigation to raise serious antitrust issues, the lack of transparency could be a thing of the past …
I personally have a problem with Google handling of his Parking partners…”just trust us”
It is called …
“Theft by Deception” (Google it before they redirect it, ha)
a Criminal code offense…
We all know the above charge is all true!
THEFT BY DECEPTIONl
://www.lrc.ky.gov/krs/514-00/040.pdf