Google Is Target of ShopCity Antitrust Complaint to FTC from Bloomberg News reports yet another FTC antitrust complaint was filed against Google. This time the complaint was filed by ShopCity, a service aimed at helping local businesses sell products online.
The complaint was filed on November 11th by Gary Reback, an antitrust lawyer at Carr & Ferrell LLP in Menlo Park, California, who wrote “From the day ShopCity launched its network, the upstart competitor faced the full measure of Google’s anticompetitive tactics.”
Google’s Adam Kovacevich told Bloomberg the reason ShopCity doesn’t rank well is because the “company was violating Google’s guidelines against duplicate and auto-generated content — which our users tell us they don’t like.” Adam added, “we twice offered the company advice on how to improve their websites.”
ShopCity said they did listen to Google’s advice but have yet to achieve higher rankings from implementing the tips Google offered. Gary Reback, ShopCity’s lawyer, said Google did increase their rankings in June after receiving the subpoena from the FTC but since then their rankings have both increased and decreased over the months. Maybe, just maybe, those had to do with the Panda update?
ShopCity is one of many companies suing Google for anticompetitive practices, many have similar complaints and most will lose in court.
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Related Topics: Google: Antitrust | Google: Legal
About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz
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