Google Sued Over Drop in SERPs - Free Speech Violation or Just Business?
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One of KinderStart’s biggest complaints is that Google is violating its right to free speech under the United States Constitution. Well, I really hate to seem flip, but in order for the right to free speech to be violated, there has to be some kind of speech going on. For the most part, as near as I can tell, there really isn’t. KinderStart has forgotten one of the most basic rules of SEO: content is king. Fresh, quality content is what you need to rank well in the SERPs. If KinderStart’s site has always been like this, I’m surprised that they even managed to get 10 million page views per month, or that they didn’t experience their “cataclysmic fall” in visitors even sooner.
The sad thing is that it would be so easy for KinderStart to do something that would make them deserve a higher position in the SERPs. They have all these links to different websites. How difficult would it be to get someone to visit one or a few sites a day, poke around very thoroughly, and write a nice, long, detailed review? That would give the site fresh, valuable, useful content on a regular basis. There would be no need for a lawsuit, because Google’s spiders would come back regularly and KinderStart would score high in the SERPs for having relevant content.
But think what would happen if KinderStart goes forward with its lawsuit and prevails. Google would be seriously constrained as to the kinds of changes it can make to its algorithms. If the court were to force Google to be more transparent, it could even be compelled to reveal trade secrets. This would hurt users of search engines, because it would discourage innovation. Not just Google, but other search engines as well, would start delivering results that are less relevant, not more. Anyone who has been using search engines over the years knows what kind of frustration that can produce.
The whole argument about constraining free speech is bogus for another reason. KinderStart has not been entirely removed from Google’s index, as some stories have claimed. When I did a search on “KinderStart” in Google (without the quotation marks), on the very first page of results I saw a link for KinderToday—which, as I already mentioned, is where the site’s real content, such as it is, is located. So what’s going on here?
Perhaps it helps to draw an analogy. Think of Google for a minute not as a search engine, but as an editor or a publisher of a newspaper. There’s a lot of news happening all the time, plus editorials, press releases, classifieds, and so forth. All of this needs to be presented to readers in an organized format, preferably so that they can easily get to the most important stuff, and find whatever interests them. So the Powers That Be in a newspaper have to make decisions, not only as to what goes in and what gets cut, but what goes on page one and what goes on page 34E. Indeed, if they put something on page one that isn’t truly worthy of it, they’ll hear from their readers—and constraining someone else’s right to free speech, if we use KinderStart’s argument!
Next: Does KinderStart Have a Point? >>
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