The Daily Telegraph reports this week that Google is under investigation over allegations of penalising companies in their search results. This is on the back of three company complaints that have been made to the EU by price comparison site www.foundem.co.uk, Ciao.co.uk (owned by Micrsoft incidentally) and ejustice.fr. Foundem claim that Google implemented somekind of deliberate penalty on them to reduce their presence in the results pages.  In a statement they said… “…whereas these penalties used to be reserved for spam, or sites caught attempting to cheat Google’s algorithms, they are now increasingly targeted at perfectly legitimate vertical search and directory services. “It may not be coincidence that, collectively, these services present a nascent competitive threat to Google’s share of online advertising revenues.”

Google flatly deny this is the case, saying that it’s algorithm is designed to produce the best and most relevant results. Foundem claimed that Google was penalising it’s website in favour of it’s own price comparison results, known as Google product search. Trying to get to the bottom of all this is Chris Lake of E-consultancy who has written a superb article, citing many reasons why Foundem might not rank well in Google. The principle reason (which whole heatedly supported by redsauce.com) why they may not be appearing as prominently as they wish is that they have thousands of pages of duplicate content, as E-consultancy point out. So whilst Foundem and others may shout from the sidelines, in reality if they are not adhering to Google’s own guidelines on what makes a site perform well in its index, they really don’t have much to complain about. Moreover Google is not a publicly funded search platform. although they produce the best and more relevant results, they are under no obligation to do so. If they want to show their own product comparison results at the top of the main SERPs, that is entirely a matter for them.

This might be a touch cynical but are Foundem really on a massive PR stunt to gain inbound links…look who has been linking to them in response to their complaint…

http://blogs.ft.com/gapperblog/

http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-in-eu-antitrust-investigation.html

http://econsultancy.com/blog/4456-foundem-vs-google-a-case-study-in-seo-fail

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/19/google_hand_of_god/print.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/aug/17/google-search-baffles-internet-firm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8533551.stm

Who would turn their nose up at these sites?!

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