ShopCity: Latest Publisher To File Antitrust Complaint Against Google

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.

Related Articles:
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Google, Yelp, Others To Appear At Antitrust Hearing Wednesday
Google Expects A Black Eye At Today’s Senate Antitrust Hearing
Google Wins Potentially Significant Antitrust Victory In Ohio
Do The Majority Of Americans Think Google Is Unfair?
EU Antitrust Complaints Against Google Grow To Nine
WSJ: Android, Along With Web Search, Now Part Of Google Antitrust Probe
Googleopoly: The Definitive Guide To Antitrust Investigations Against Google
Google Set For US Senate Committee Anti-Trust Investigation
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

Google+ Pages: connect with all the things you care about

In life we connect with all kinds of people, places and things. There’s friends and family, of course, but there’s also the sports teams we root for, the coffee shops we’re loyal to, and the TV shows we can’t stop watching (to name a few).

So far Google+ has focused on connecting people with other people. But we want to make sure you can build relationships with all the things you care about—from local businesses to global brands—so today we’re rolling out Google+ Pages worldwide.

People + pages, better together
Google+ has always been a place for real-life sharing, and Google+ Pages is no exception. After all: behind every page (or storefront, or four-door sedan) is a passionate group of individuals, and we think you should able to connect with them too.

For you and me, this means we can now hang out live with the local bike shop, or discuss our wardrobe with a favorite clothing line, or follow a band on tour. Google+ pages give life to everything we find in the real world. And by adding them to circles, we can create lasting bonds with the pages (and people) that matter most.

For businesses and brands, Google+ pages help you connect with the customers and fans who love you. Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face. All you need to do is start sharing, and you'll soon find the super fans and loyal customers that want to say hello.

A number of pages are already available (see below), but any organization will soon be able to join the community at plus.google.com/pages/create.

Direct Connect from Google search
People search on Google billions of times a day, and very often, they're looking for businesses and brands. Today's launch of Google+ Pages can help people transform their queries into meaningful connections, so we're rolling out two ways to add pages to circles from Google search. The first is by including Google+ pages in search results, and the second is a new feature called Direct Connect.

Maybe you're watching a movie trailer, or you just heard that your favorite band is coming to town. In both cases you want to connect with them right now, and Direct Connect makes it easy—even automatic. Just go to Google and search for [+], followed by the page you're interested in (like +Angry Birds). We'll take you to their Google+ page, and if you want, we’ll add them to your circles.

Direct Connect works for a limited number of pages today (like +Google, +Pepsi, and +Toyota), but many more are coming. In the meantime, organizations can learn more about Direct Connect in our Help Center.

With Google+, we strive to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. Today’s initial launch of Google+ Pages brings us a little bit closer, but we’ve still got lots of improvements planned, and miles to go before we sleep. So stay tuned.

Source: Google Blog

How To Find Local Influencers On Google Plus

Google has been making a big deal out of privacy lately, but Google+ just launched a slew of new features designed to make people easier to find.

I am particularly intrigued by the new Ripples feature, which allows you to see who has shared a post and track it as it gets shared by others. It is, in fact, like watching a ripple.

Ripples strikes me as much more of a feature for marketers than for consumers. I suppose Google+ wants to attract power users who typically have more of a marketing mindset than the average Joe.

So of course the first thing I thought of was that Ripples would be an excellent tool to find local influencers on Google Plus. Here’s how:

(Warning: The techniques described below are merely for educational purposes. I take no responsibility for the potential spam and privacy issues Google has unleashed here.)

1. First Find Google+ Users In Your Target Location

I am sure Google+ will eventually have some nifty ways for you to find people near you who share similar interests, but let’s say you wanted to find those people today. Perhaps you want to engage with them about subjects you share in common.

Maybe you’re a vegan restaurant in the Bay Area and you want to build a network of local vegans to share recipes with and perhaps at some point get them to promote your restaurant. Well there’s an app for that — a search app that is, called Google.

Go to Google and do the following search:

This query shows you URLs of Google+ members who use the word “vegan” and whose profiles show that they live in the Bay Area. Depending on the query, you may need to play around with this a bit by adding additional filters. For example, if you were looking for people in Brooklyn but didn’t want to find people named “Brooklyn,” you would add “-intitle:Brooklyn”.

Here are the top results of my Bay Area vegan query:

2. Find People Who Are Interested In What You Have To Say

Google gave 2,740 results for this query, which means that you now can find several hundred people who might be interested in your vegan vittles. You could click on each of their profiles and figure out which ones seem interesting and willing to engage, but first:

3. Find The Most Active/Influential Ones

Go back to Google and do the following query:

This query, in theory, will show you all of the posts for a particular member — in this case, me. As you can see, I have made 191 posts thus far (nothing about vegans, though):

If you want to see if the person has been active recently, click on the “Show Search Tools” link at the bottom of the left-hand navigation on the Google SERP:

Set the filter to “Past 24 hours” or “Past week” or a custom range to see how active the person is.

Once you have found the right people, it’s time to check out some Google+ Ripple action. Review the posts by the member that contain the keyword you are interested in by doing the following query in Google Plus:

When you have found a post that looks relevant to your subject click on the “View Ripples” link on the drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner of the post:

Now, you can see who else has shared this post:

This data shows you how influential the person is, how popular the post is and who else is interested in the subject. By examining this data for each member, you can start to figure out who is most influential about your subject matter in your area.

Once you have built the list, then it’s up to you to figure out how to engage with them in a way that will be mutually beneficial and help get your message out.

Now it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyhow: These techniques are only valuable if you can convince people to invest their attention in you.

And there are no magic queries in Google that can do that for you.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Entries

• Up Close With Google+ Search
• How To Post Your Google+ Feed To Facebook And Twitter
• How Being "Friends" On Google+ Leads To Better Rankings
• Marketers Root For Expanded Opportunities Represented By Google+
• Google Tweaks Its Rel=Author Display, Promotes Google+ In Search Results

Related Topics: Google: Social Search | Locals Only

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About The Author: Andrew Shotland is the proprietor of Local SEO Guide, a local search engine optimization consulting company specializing in yellow pages seo and local directory search—the blog is pretty fabulous too. See more articles by Andrew Shotland

Google Hides Search Referral Data with New SSL Implementation - Emergency Whiteboard Friday

On Tuesday, Google announced that signed-in users will, by default, be routed to the SSL version of Google (https://www.google.com). Before Tuesday, most users used non-SSL Google for their searches. Now, according to Google, "...a web site accessed through organic search results on http://www.google.com (non-SSL) can see both that the user came from google.com and their search query... However, for organic search results on SSL search, a web site will only know that the user came from google.com." The effects were obvious immediately. Here's a screenshot of our GA account showing the quantity of "(not provided)" keywords going up from Sunday to today:

Clearly, the inbound marketing community isn't thrilled. Take Ian Lurie of Portent, for example: he declared war with Google outright. Having a bunch of "(not provided)" referral keywords in Google Analytics is definitely not pretty. Fortunately, as Avinash Kaushik explains in this Google+ post, there's something you can do to at least gauge the effects on your analytics, and as Rand will explain, the effects aren't as devastating for most users as they could be. Yet.

In this emergency Whiteboard Friday, Rand will go over the changes Google has made, why it happened (and why it really might have happened), and what you can do to stay calm and fight back. Let us know how this change has affected your sites in the comments below!

Just Keep Going

I am really overwhelmed to read Rand's Story of success; so without any fear of Google Panda I did simply COPY & PASTE the entire content for my blog....
It's a Original Story of Struggle of Rand Fishkins

"In 1997 I was just graduating from high school and started to design small business websites using Microsoft Frontpage and a variety of amateurish HTML hacks. In 2001, I dropped out of college, two classes away from graduating to work full time at a tiny web consulting business with my Mom. That didn’t go very well.

Approx. debt load from credit cards, personal loans, lines of credit, etc.

From 2001-2003, we took out nearly $150,000 in loans, mostly from credit cards and a few equipment lenders, ostensibly to help “grow the business.” Instead, it made us foolish investors in low ROI projects, contractors, office space and a variety of too-good-to-be-true salespeople.

By 2004, we could no longer pay the minimum dues on our bill and our debt skyrocketed. Credit cards with $30,000 limits quickly ballooned to $75,000 in “total owed,” thanks to nasty penalties + fees. After 4 years of attempting to make our consultancy work, the only logical move was to quit.

But, of course, we didn’t do that.

I’d love to say that we had simply believed so strongly in our own ability to make it work that we kept going, but that’s a lie. The reason we didn’t declare bankruptcy, suffer 7 years of bad credit scores and try something else is simple; we’d never told my Dad we were in debt.

Instead of nobly fighting on against increasing despair-filled odds, we were actually just working to cover up a lie of omission, and one that might have had disastrous consequences for our family. The weird part is that it worked.

From 2004-2007, we shifted from building small websites (and spending a fortune on outsourced contractors, non-pay-upfront projects, expensive office space and the interest on our debt) to growing a small SEO consultancy based on the notoriety of our blog. That shift helped us earn press, paying clients and a renewed sense of purpose. By the middle of 2007, we were debt-free (not by paying them off completely, but by settling with each lender for between 10-30% of the total sum owed – be forewarned, this screws your credit history for even longer than 7 years). At the end of 2007, we raised a small round of venture capital for our nascent software business and the rest is history.

These past few weeks, the software business that sprouted from the seeds of our near-destruction had its first ever $10mm+ run-rate month. We had our backs to the wall with no other way out, and eventually, it paid off.

Two recent articles highlighted the value of tenacity in achieving great things in the startup world. The first, on Reid Hoffman at LinkedIn, details the not-so-sexy, but ultimately remarkably rewarding story of a decade-long struggle to make the professional social network into something great.

The second is on Octopart, a Y-Combinator backed venture that “hung in there.”

I don’t mean to suggest that the key to every business is blindly pushing ahead even when failure seems certain. But I would say, as someone who’s been down a deep, ugly fiscal hole with their company, that refusing to quit brings a strange and special power.

In my opinion, it’s impossible to build that into a business at a later stage. Founders either have some internal or external motivator driving them to succeed in the face of any odds, or they don’t. Being devoid of that motivator won’t necessarily result in failure – in fact, I know plenty of entrepreneurs who’ve given up on project (or company) A, B and C only to have a breakout hit with D. But I do see something special in those whose tenacity makes them unable to give up. Folks like Dave Schappell of Teachstreet, Don Charlton of theResumator, Will + Duncan from Distilled, Dave Snyder from Blueglass and Chris Savage of Wistia (along with many more I’ve met) embody this quality.

I wish, in my case, that it was solely intrinsic passion, but in the end, I’m just amazed and thankful that we found a way. "

A New Google+ Release in App Store

Good news for those of you have been experiencing Chinese, Japanese, and Korean keyboard issues on iOS. A new Google+ release is now available in the app store (1.0.5.2346) which should resolve those issues, as well as other keyboard related issues reported last week:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google/id447119634?mt=8

Keep in mind that it may take time before it rolls out everywhere.

Release notes can be found here:http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=1620754

Please continue to send us your feedback!

Release notes:
Fixes for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean keyboard issues
Re-enable autocomplete when composing a post

App Store - Google+

Read reviews, get customer ratings, see screenshots, and learn more about Google+ on the App Store. Download Google+ and enjoy it on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

Source:Anish Acharya  -  8:56 AM

Google Science Fair Winners

Great paper by Naomi detailing bad air quality and asthma wins Google Science Fair. Turns out particulate 
matter and volatile organics are bad.
home | naomibetterairbetterlife

President Obama congratulates Google Science Fair winners, from left, Naomi Shah, Shree Bose, and Lauren Hodge in the Oval Office, Oct. 3, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
http://www.google.com/events/sciencefair/

Source:Larry Page  -  11:13 AM