In March, US childcare company KinderStart sued Google after its website was given a PageRank score of zero. Site traffic immediately fell by 70%. This hurt KinderStart in two ways; first it choked off their main marketing channel and second it all but killed off the company’s revenue stream from Google’s AdSense syndication scheme.
The two key things about any Google rating are:
PageRanking impacts on Keyword ranking, as do several other undisclosed factors when Google is deciding where a page should place in a keyword search.
Having a PageRank of zero can be a traffic killer as KinderStart, who have had a website for six years, soon found out. Unfortunately, US District Court Judge, Jeremy Fogel, granted Google’s motion to dismiss all nine of KinderStart’s claims, including that Google had ‘engaged in pervasive monopolistic practices’, which stifled the company’s right to free speech. The ruling said, ‘Google’s statement as to whether a particular website is ‘worth your time’ necessarily reflects its subjective judgment as to what factors make a website important’.
This seems a bit illogical because Google itself claims in its description of PageRanking that, ‘PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms’. But in their court documents, Google said rankings were subjective. So what is it, subjective or objective? It can’t be both.
Judge Fogel has left KinderStart the option to refile their case before September 29, although several US legal experts who have commented on the case, say this is just as unlikely to succeed as the original claim. Google have also obtained an anti-SLAPP motion against KinderStart. This is a standard pressure tactic used by big companies to make small companies like KinderStart liable to pay their opponents’ legal fees (ouch!).
We think this is an important case even in the UK, as the issue of online promotion and search engine ranking will have a direct impact on the business model of many UK education companies.
Our old website has a PageRank of 3/10 and we hope our new site (launching soon) will be at least a 7/10.
