Google Sued for Low Rankings

[mikey_freedom]

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people should take responsibilty for what their kids and selves do online.

Exactly - seems that concepts of individual responsibility and liberty are alien to the claimant's position. Their first case was almost laughable but this one really annoys me because they see themselves as some arbiter of what is acceptable to the whole world.

First they came for the pornographers but I did not speak out because I was not a pornographer...

Perfect paraphrase to highlight why this case is so wrong

[gunneradt]

The problem for me is that Google doesn't improve its algorithm, it just tweaks it so that the same sites don't appear at the top for too long. One of my sites fell out for 3 months for no reason and then came back for no reason. Why? To encourage me to use adwords, that's why.

I don't like MS but I would simply love it if, in a future release of IE they filtered out adwords - MS must be itching to do it.

I love the way some people can be so naive that they believe that simply stopping Adsense appearing on their pc stops Google from monitoring what they are doing - oh well if it makes you feel better!

Moredial, your argument for not displaying Adsense may have some validity were it not for the fact that many affiliates on this forum make a substantial income from Google Adsense....so wouldn't we/they all be cutting our nose to spite our face?

Mind you the way this thread is going I can see it wont be long before the 'Google hates affiliates' paranoia rises to the surface yet again...

[moredial]

I don't like MS but I would simply love it if, in a future release of IE they filtered out adwords - MS must be itching to do it.

MS have been filtering out adwords and any other site content you don't want to see for years - almost as long as there has been the ability to connect to the internet. Go back and read my earlier post - or use the following for quick reference.

You know that little file on your computer called hosts? - no dots and no extension.

Well, that file is there so that you can help the browser find domains quickly - your own little DNS cache, so to speak. Each URL you request is checked against the records in the hosts file before the request is sent into cyberspace. If you have a site you visit often, so that you don't have to make a DNS request (must have been slow in the old dial-up days) you add the domain name and IP address to the hosts file and the browser rushes off to that IP address to fetch the domain = faster surfing.

Following the idea?

It works just as well for telling the browser where to go to fetch sites and content you don't want to view. Just type in 127.0.0.1 as the IP address next to the domain and the browser will look right there on your own computer for the content to display - IP address found so no need to look anywhere else = error message displayed.

Adwords, google-analytics tracking, pop-ups, chat rooms - anything you can think of that you don't want to see. Or, anything you do want to see quicker.

This is how to set it up. You will see another file called hosts.(can't remember - long time since I had an MS computer) with the the hosts file (depending on the operating system it is somewhere below the windows directory - C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\etc\hosts) which is the original and includes full instructions on how to edit the file.

1. Rename hosts as hosts.old
2. Open hosts.old using NotePad or other text editor - not Word nor MSWord
3. Edit
4. Save as hosts.txt
5. Rename hosts.txt to hosts
6. Go back to your browser, and see how well it works.

This all just goes to show just how right the comment about individual responsibility is. Don't blame your browser and Google for the content - fix it so you don't see it.

Most operating systems have a similar file - you just need to search around to find it.

Back to the subject of this original thread:

I am amazed that a year down the line, kinderstart.com are still having problems in the SERPs. I know it can take up to 2 or 3 years for some sites to recover after doing something silly like not doing good housekeeping when they change IP addresses, but after this length of time there should be more to show than lawyers getting rich on another claim.

Just my 2 pennies worth.

[GettingPersonal]

Is this a reasonable analogy?

A company outsources its cleaning contract. The contractors that wins the contract grows its profits 80%. The criteria in which the company selects its contractors changes in the hope of making visitors to their building more appealing for a lower cost. They do not renew their contract or give them less of a share.

You could say that the company and the contractors have a contract they have mutally agreed to but any website is welcome to ask Google not to include their site!

If Google do not give visitors what they want, they'll soon find Yahoo et al.

[km8]

You know that little file on your computer called hosts? - no dots and no extension.
...

1. Rename hosts as hosts.old
2. ...
3. Go back to your browser, and see how well it works.

This all just goes to show just how right the comment about individual responsibility is. Don't blame your browser and Google for the content - fix it so you don't see it.
...
Just my 2 pennies worth.

Hmm, I get it - that's just so incredibly easy peasy!

So, on a similar theme - I keep getting speeding tickets but I know my car can be customised so it won't go faster than 65mph. Can't remember step-by-step how to do it though.

Could you give me a tutorial on how to do that.

I'm sure most car owners would be just as grateful for that as computer owners are for the gems above.

Keep up the good work.

[moredial]

So, on a similar theme - I keep getting speeding tickets but I know my car can be customised so it won't go faster than 65mph. Can't remember step-by-step how to do it though.

Could you give me a tutorial on how to do that.

I'm sure most car owners would be just as grateful for that as computer owners are for the gems above.

Keep up the good work.

Yes, Guv'nor

[moredial]

You could say that the company and the contractors have a contract they have mutally agreed to but any website is welcome to ask Google not to include their site!

If Google do not give visitors what they want, they'll soon find Yahoo et al.

I think that you are forgetting just how ignorant the average visitor is. Ask most people and they think that the ads displayed in the SERPs are part of the results - the best ones, so to speak. I doubt if even 0.1% of people who use any search engine know how to apply the many filters available to make a more precise search. Or could name 3 search engines.

I think we are all the same, we try a few top results and if we don't find what we are looking for, a quick click on the ads because life is just too short to go through 20 results. And, with the price of ppc coming down the more relevant the landing page, those ads are now doing pretty well in terms of relevance.

But, when I am researching for information, there aren't the advertisers desperate for a few clicks. And I want the latest information, not to be sent to an old site that had to sit around being sandboxed for a few years before it reappeared in the SERPs. So here I use http://www.live.com/ because I know that I am most likely to find what I am looking for within the top #2 - #5. I used to use Yahoo but gave up on them over the last few years, firstly when they were suffering from unstable databases and even more so now that they have increased the weight of inbound links.

And, I am one of those webmasters who bans Googlebot from my sites when they get sandboxed or put into the supplemental results. And any other bot that I never see in my referrer logs. I don't see any point in having my server hammered by a bot that is not going to send me any business. This is a 'contract', like you say. If 50 bots come to crawl my sites every day but only a few send visitors I don't see why my visitors should have to put up with a server which is being slowed down by a bot that will never send me any visitors.