St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

It was bound to happen. Some corporation with big money was going to loose their page rank and thus lots of business. KinderStart.com, which by all appearance used to have a page rank of 7 on their index page and great page ranks for lots of interior pages. Google updated their search engine, now their PR is is 4 on their index page and n/a on their interior pages. They say they are blacklisted, but they still have over 43000 pages in google index ¹.

Well guess what? They lost tons of visitors, thus looses value on their advertising. They have sued Google, stating Google punitively or arbitrarily stopped pointing Internet searchers in its direction.²
Indeed you can even search for kinderstart by name in google and they aren’t on the first page. ³.

That’s all part of the story you’ve probably already heard. Here’s my take:

While I think it’s a bit excessive for them not to be able to be found when you type in their exact name, they are nothing but a link farm. They should have never been in google in the first place and Google has every right and indeed and obligation to searchers to keep web sites like this out of it’s search engine results. We certainly don’t want to go back to the old days before Google where every page in the search engine results was a page full of links which led to a page full of links etc. etc.

Of course there is room for in search engines for specialized directories, but even today there are far far to many of them in search engine results. Especially Google’s. Here’s a great example: Try searching Google for “St. Petersburg Restaurant” (without the quotes). On the first three pages there are only 2 restaurants. One on page two and one on page three. The rest are all link farms (or directories, whichever you’d like to call them). Yahoo’s results are little better with 4 restaurants on the first page, the rest being link farms and/or review sites. MSN’s results are perfect with every result on the first page being a restaurant. They prove it is possible.

If someone wanted restaurant reviews, they would put the word “reviews” in their query, if they wanted directories, they would put the word “directory” in their query. Why would google do this? Well a look at the right half of the page provides a great clue. If your restaurant was on the first page of these Search Engine Results, you would have no reason to buy an ad on the right hand side of the page would you?
Once again, search engines are providing poor search engine results to increase advertising sales. Some could argue that all restaurants aren’t good at SEO. But providing relevant content is type search engines responsibility.

This suit could bring several remedies if successful that are desperately needed in the Search Engine World:

• Requiring Search Engines to publish specific rules for websites to follow in order not to be blacklisted or have PageRank removed.
• Requiring Search Engines to notify websites with reasons for blacklisting
• Requiring Search Engines to offer specific ways to remedy blacklisting.
• Requiring search engines to display relevant links

However this web site is a lousy candidate for this lawsuit and they will probably loose horribly. This will set a precedent and prevent any positive change in the Search Engine world.

Search Engine Results are a complicated thing, but it’s clear that google is manipulating results to increase advertising. This results in poor service for searchers and web site that don’t play the AdWords game getting screwed.

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