by SEO Consultant
S. Inarejos
S. Inarejos
Google's increasing popularity and fame does have its drawbacks, it seems. During the past few months the search engine giant has been inflicted by a stream of lawsuits, mainly related to copyright infringement. One of the most high profile in the barrage of legal cases held against Google comes from KinderStart.com, a search engine and directory focused on children and parenting information, who claimed last year that Google had intentionally dropped their PageRank to zero in an attempt to destroy the competition.
Kinderstart.com claimed:
"Google has interfered with KinderStart's First Amendment rights [to free speech] and has engaged in predatory conduct and anticompetitive conduct directed toward achieving the objective of controlling prices and/or destroying competition."
It is difficult to consider Kinderstart.com, a rather simplistic search engine in comparison to Google, as a threat in any way to the search engine giant. Judge Jeremy Fogel, who was in charge of this Court case in California, dismissed the case for the second time this week after KinderStart failed to prove the allegations, labelling them as "vague, ambiguous and probably false".
Kinderstart.com was launched in May 2000, and aimed to help web surfers find specific resources and information related to young children aged up to seven years old, offering advice on a variety of issues from adoption to child development, pregnancy to nutrition tips.
According to Yahoo!'s link command tool, Kinderstart.com possesses approximately 8,900 inbound links. This reflects its huge popularity; however the site's PageRank dropped drastically and still stands at 0 out of 10.
PageRank was developed at Stanford University by the Google founders, Sergey Brinn and Larry Page, while doing their PhD research project. The idea was inspired by the system applied to important academic papers, through which the relative importance of a paper is determined by the number of citations it receives from other academic papers. In this way, links to websites could be thought of as 'citations', and when a site has many 'votes' or incoming links its PageRank increases.
PageRank can be regarded as the value or relative importance that Google assigns to any particular page and it is intimately related to Google's rankings. Google tweaks the PageRank algorithm frequently and many companies may notice a slight drop or increase in their PageRank when these changes do take place. However, when a site's PageRank drops completely to zero, this is due to a penalty being enforced as a result of the employment of spamming techniques, such as link building or keyword stuffing.
After eleven months of intense legal wrangling, Kinderstart's lawsuit against Google has been repeatedly dismissed, and the child-focused site may now also be made liable for Google's legal fees.
