Google Sued Over Drop in PR

Have you heard this one yet? A webmaster who was raking in the cash selling links on his PR8 site is suing Google, because his rank dropped to a PR4.

Search King, Web site network and advertising seller in Oklahoma City, has filed a lawsuit against Google for allegedly bumping down it's Page Rank unfairly.

Search King states that they started a PR Ad Network - an advertising network sells text links on high ranking websites - in August. Their PR dropped at the end of September, from a PR of 8 to a PR of 4. Search King alleges that google did this intentionally.

Cited in the suit:

"Google, as a provider of a ranking system upon with the Internet community relies, must apply the system in a manner that is not arbitrary, nor aimed at restraint of trade."

As Dan Sullivan's article at Search Engine watch elloquently states:

Even if Google did take action against PR Ad Network, it might argue that program violates its webmaster guidelines against participating "in link exchanges for the sole purpose of increasing your ranking in search engines."

As far as profiting from google serps, Google's Terms of Service states:

"The Google Search Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Search Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales..."

They don't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning any compensation from google. But, just for argument's sake, let's say they did. Can you imagine the ramifications of such a ruling? Everybody and their dog who ever had a website that earned a penny on the internet would be filing a lawsuit every time google made an update.

In my opinion, these morons didn't file a lawsuit in hopes of winning anything. They're using all the publicity surrounding a sensationally idiotic lawsuit to pump up their pr and traffic via the articles and links they're getting from the coverage.

Blog Spamming

I have a few blogs hosted at blogspot.com. On these blogs I get some comments that are obviously put there by webbies to get some backlinks to their sites.

I don't try to stop them. After all, they've always left a nice little message...Now, I don't know if they're using any blog spam warez or not, but I don't really care. I just don't get all excited about blog spamming.

Some SEO people are dead against it - it's a black hat SEO tactic, after all. Me, I just don't give a darn. I figure that blog owners can stop it if they want. It's easy to do.

Besides, some day the search engines are going to figure out that blog links shouldn't be getting as much respect as they do. Then the sites whose backlinks are coming from blogs and virtually nowhere else are going to find themselves in the internet void.