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This is a Load of Hooey
By JLP | March 19, 2006
A website called KinderStart.com (I’m not linking to them because I don’t want to promote what they are doing) is suing Google because they claim that Google downgraded their page rank for no reason. According to the article:
“KinderStart charges that Google without warning in March 2005 penalized the site in its search rankings, sparking a “cataclysmic” 70 percent fall in its audience — and a resulting 80 percent decline in revenue.
At its height, KinderStart counted 10 million page views per month, the lawsuit said. Web site page views are a basic way of measuring audience and are used to set advertising rates.”
Something is awfully smelly about this lawsuit. How do you lose 70% of your audience? I find it hard to believe that this can all be blamed on Google. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.
Topics: Miscellaneous | 4 Comments »
March 19th, 2006 at 8:32 pm
Your right, that is a bunch of hooey. It goes for every company that gets to big, they get sued more. Anyways I enjoy reading your blog. Can you link my blog to yours. I would appreciate it.
Thanks
Steve
March 20th, 2006 at 1:45 am
“Hooey” is potty talk. Shame on you.
March 20th, 2006 at 7:26 am
“Hooey” means “nonsense.”
March 20th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
The site you mention probably gets 99% of their traffic from Google searches – I don’t see anything there that would attract return visitors. So if Google got smart and quit directing traffic to them from searches their traffic (and therefore their income) easily could have dropped off.
The site appears to exist simply to draw people in from searches and then have them click out of the site when they see that an Adsense ad might have a better answer than the site itself.
If they had built up their page rank then they would get quite a bit of traffic on the 100s of topics they have pages on. I am guessing that Google looked at the site and determined that its sole purpose was to bring in search results and point them to Adsense ads – in other words they serve no value. Google therefore zero’d out the site’s page rank which would put them so far down in the search rank that nobody ever found them.
So if they went from thousands of hits per day to hundreds they very easily could have lost all the easy money they were making on such a site.