Online Store to Sue Blogger Over Google Ranking?

An anonymous reader writes "An online business owner is threatening to sue blog owner Dean Hunt (DeanHunt.com) because he is upset that the blog owner is doing better than his business in the Google search rankings. After an initial threat, Dean received a follow-up threatening to take legal action against him. So far Dean has elected not to name and shame this business owner."

Re:Ranking....

[OrangeTide]

google likes those who link and get linked. If your online store is poorly connected on the WWW then your ranking will be based on other factors that don't seem to be quite as important to google.

My resume is better ranked on google than some (minor) online stores.

Cry me a river...

[Marton]

An undisclosed somebody is threatening to sue a poor little blogger over something. Come on. This is not news. Where are the facts?

Re:Cry me a river...

[udderly]

Facts? Facts? We don't need no stinking facts!

Even easier.

[khasim]

Put a little link at the top of his site saying "If you're looking for Texas lawyer .... click here (link)".

What's next? Students sued because they're more popular than the unpopular students? "Sally only won home coming queen because she's a cheerleader and promiscuous! It's UNFAIR!"

TV ad - Was your child devastated when she wasn't voted home coming queen? The law offices of Dewey Cheatum can help. We also provide Google ranking services.

Re:Perhaps Its the Lawyer

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt that guy is doing business online. His resume also implies that he isn't an idiot. Keep guessing.

Re:Ranking....

[morgan_greywolf]

The part I find bizarre is this:

Exactly how does the online business owner figure that the blog owner, Dean Hunt, bears any responsibility for how Google ranks his blog with respect to the online store? Only Google is responsible for how it ranks pages. I suppose the business owner can sue Google, but somehow I doubt he'd get very far, considering that Google doesn't owe the shop owner anything in terms of pageranking unless he entered into some sort of contract with Google, but that's all between him and Google, right?

Even the stupidest lawyers aren't stupid enough

[Sir Homer]

To send letters like that. I have a feeling Mr. Dean Hunt is fabricating this story, as his business is mainly google bombing and search engine optimization.

Re:Ranking....

[cayenne8]

" If your online store is poorly connected on the WWW then your ranking will be based on other factors that don't seem to be quite as important to google."

What I find even more amusing...that so many people thing the internet was constructed primarily for commerce...when in fact, that is only a fairly recent by-product.

Re:Mod Parent Up

[DragonMageWTF]

Thanks for the link. Posted a comment and guessing it will fail to get past the stage of "our comment is awaiting moderation."

Re:THIS IS FAKE, HE MADE THIS UP! PLEASE READ.

[Frosty Piss]

So what social punishment lays in store for this guy if he is lying.

Who's the bigger ass here? This guy for perpetrating a sham on the Web ( For shame! Inaccuracy and fraud on the Web? Who would have ever thought! ), or Slashdot for once again falling for some bogus story because it had all the right toilet paper thin anti-establishment shit smeared all over it?

I'm Still Waiting To Be Extorted...

[Bones3D_mac]

My online identity of nearly 10 years (Bones3D) is probably starting to look awfully tasty to some enterprising 3D modeling/animation software developer, since it sounds like it'd be a high end inverse kinematics system of some sort. In my case though, it's more of an amalgam of a high school nickname and the field I was trained in several years later. So the two parts are virtually unrelated.

Another fun one, would be my real name itself (James Meade), which actually is a popular clothing manufacturer out in the U.K., similar to what Levi Strauss is here in the U.S. I'm not real worried about them though, since I rarely use my real name online more than I have to.

At any rate, it helps to be aware of how your identity could be taken out of it's original context and used for commercial purposes.

Needless to say, it does bring up an important question... how much is your online identity worth to you? And on what terms would you be willing to part with it?

"key" words

[Joebert]

I've grown to learn that when people make a point to let you know they're "honestly" doing somthing, or "genuinely" feeling some way, they're full of shit.

Re:Hoax or not it's damn funny.

[Reality Master 101]

This newly-created account is Dean Hunt!! Read his posts. They're subtle attempts to get people to link to the story, as well as convince them it's not a hoax. Another Slashdotter figured this out, and I completely agree.

You, sir, are a scum-bag loser.

Re:THIS IS FAKE, HE MADE THIS UP! PLEASE READ.

[91degrees]

Well, I for one don't think he's an ass.

If this really is his plan, then I'd say it's a pretty good hoax. I'm not the only one who finds hoaxes funny.

Re:Here's my secret

[mccoma]

great.... "nonsensical" content - no wonder Google is becoming so polluted with crap. I do hope the search engines adapt to this crud.

Check out how he is doing it!

[sr. taquito]

Oh my, if you hover over the people's names who have submitted responses, seems like each person's web site that the name links to is a business. I tried to submit a response, but it was rejected! He's a sneaky devil. That is how those sites are getting higher rankings, his blog links to their sites through the fake comments.

Re:Ranking....

[megaditto]

No it isn't. Robots.txt does not include "article.pl" [slashdot.org] which is the article front page that shows all the comments.

As long as your post is modded up and thus visible via article.pl, all your links get counted!

In particular, all +5 Comments' links are registered by google.

Re:My Comment was removed

[Zeinfeld]

Interesting. Most people who publish such letters want to stick it to the person who is attacking them. It is entirely believable that someone would do this sort of thing and similar things have happened. But why hide the identity of the site? Of course it is entirely possible that the site can't be published because it never existed. Other points that are compatible with this interpetation include the short length of time the blog has been operating for, only since July. And if you read the alleged emails themselves they appear to be written in the same style as the rest of the blog. I am not so sure about the testimonials from other sites he has now linked to. How many people would insert the term 'a respected' in front of the name of a blogger they only just found out about. Such appreciation tends to be limited to the self.

Re:Ranking....

[morgan_greywolf]

Okay, so I own a tree service company and call it Aardvark Tree Service, Inc. w00t! I get put first in the phone book!

You come along and start "AAA Tree Service Co.", since you also figured out, as did I, that companies are listed in the phone book in alphabetical order. Does this mean I now get to sue you because you are now first in the phone book?

This whole thing is just an utterly ridiculous penis measuring contest.

It is real?

[microbee]

Could there be a remote possibility that bloggers now start inventing stories to attract more clicks?

Re:Ranking....

[grahammm]

I have often wished that stores would not get such a high google rank. Many a time I have used google to try and find information about a product only to find the first few pages of response to be filled with stores selling the product and (even worse) price comparison sites.

If this is true...

[denebian devil]

He did a really good job of it. A scan of his last couple months of posts show that on average he gets about 3-5 comments per post (if he's lucky). With this google search term fiasco, he's been getting dozens of comments per post, the highest so far being 158 on one post alone.

Mission accomplished??

Re:Get a Clue.

[anagama]

"5 - Is telemarketing good business? Junk mail? Sure, the rules are level, it's a tool that can be used. But it's a detriment. It's a drain. "

This is your thinking, and this is why you're wrong.

What is a drain about Junk Mail? It GIVES PEOPLE JOBS. It MAKES PEOPLE MONEY.

It's a needless waste of natural resources, trees and oil come to mind immediately but there must be others. It does nothing but cause me frustration and increase waste. And you can be sure the junk mailers aren't contributing to even the financial costs of landfill space, let alone the environmental costs of their actions. It is a "tragedy of the commons" situation.

As for "job creation" -- so would roving bands of rock throwing hoodlums. Think of all the glass companies and installers that would employ. Now, breaking people's windows is illegal because it wrongfully deprives the window owners of their personal resources. The distinction with junk mail is that sadly, junk mail is still legal because people haven't figured out that junk mailers are wrongfully depriving us of our resources (money to clean up after the bastards, and environmental destruction to make the crap). So from a moral rather than legal perspective, where "moral" includes the notion that depriving people of their personal resources is wrong, junk mail is just as immoral as property damage. It's just sadly legal.

But who cares what they say about their own stuff?

[TheLink]

And maybe some (not all) blogs should be ranked higher because more people find what they say about those businesses more interesting and useful than what those businesses say about themselves.

If I want to find contact information and other objective information (menus, product/price lists) for the business then I'll try their website first, but if I'm wondering whether to do business with them, frankly their website is secondary.

Even if I'm looking for docs on a particular product I don't bother with starting from their website, I start with google - most corporate website search engines are crap - for example you get lots of useless PR releases bullshit instead of actual tech specs or drivers. They should just put all their pages in plain HTML where search engines can index them. But I guess someone has to waste lots of company money on paying expensive "web designers" to charge megabucks just to create all that crap and slap on a useless search engine.

I mean who cares what "Divinci's Pizza" says about their pizza? Who even cares about Divinci's pictures of their pizza? A blogger's recent opinion and pictures of their pizzas, restaurant etc would be far more interesting for someone trying to figure out whether Divinci is worth a try.

If Google starts to rank businesses higher just because businesses pay them AND[1] Google's searches become less useful to me, I'll just switch search engines. Same goes if it's bloggers or whoever else instead.

[1] If McDonald's wants to pay 10 million USD to Google a year just to be top ranked for "McDonald's Corporation" go ahead - I don't think it will make my search results less useful.

Re:Ranking....

[montyzooooma]

What's needed (and may even be available) is a google search term -shop.