Surprise! Google accused of abusing monopoly

As an admirer of a lot of what Google does, it’s with mixed feelings (amusement and schadenfreude) that we read of its latest travails.

The EU, that bastion of free market economics, has launched an anti-trust investigation over the allegation by two shopping comparison sites (one owned by Microsoft, paragons of free market competition) that Google has been applying a penalty to their pages so that they don’t rank well in Google’s natural search results.

What’s more, they allege that by displaying its own ‘Shopping Results’ against a product search, Google is abusing its UK market position which is claimed to be circa 90%.

Google didn’t see fit to put up a spokesman for the item on Radio 4’s Today programme and you can see why.  Unnamed company sources say that the shopping channels concerned have little ‘original content’. Whereas Google’s shopping Results are pregnant with insight, wit and revelation.

It’s irrelevant that Google doesn’t charge merchants who list their products in its Shopping Results for any click-throughs. Either show all product listings or none. You can’t have it both ways.

QUESTION: How can you get to page one of Google for a keyword that’s got 270 million competing pages?

ANSWER: Get into Google News.

Last year we launched a 100% ‘green’ web hosting service. This means you could be certain that the energy used to power the server on which your website sits is powered 100% by wind, sun and rain. The only way we could do this was by acquiring a dedicated server based offshore - in this instance, in California. UK alternative sources of energy are still too unreliable to guarantee 100% ‘green’.

Our problem was that keywords like ‘green hosting’ and ‘google green’ have respectively, nearly 80 million and 270 million competing pages. Getting a top ranking would be tough.

Then we remembered that Google  uses a website’s international IP address as one of its geographic ranking factors. In other words, if a site is hosted outside of the country in which it wants to be found, a UK site hosted in the US for example, Google would regard it as less relevant than a site hosted in the UK. It would therefore give the site hosted outside the UK a lower ranking in its UK search results.  So we emailed Google to ask whether they’d reconsider this policy for sites hosted on servers powered 100% by alternative energy.

Answer came there none which suprised us as Google likes to make a big thing about its eco creds. It’s even getting into the green energy business.

So last week we issued a press release about Google’s apparent confusion.

The result was that today we’re on the first page of Google for ‘green hosting’, ‘google green’ and other related key-phrases. That’s because Google shows results from Google news on its first page and bless their cotton socks, they haven’t penalised us for having the audacity to question their policy.

The moral of the story is that if you can find a newsworthy angle, you can beat the competition provided you know how to optimise your press release for Google and the other search engines.

In case you’ve missed our press release, we’re campaigning to persuade Google to stop penalising UK website that are hosted on servers powered 100% by green energy because the servers are outside the UK. This is the gist of the release but you can read the whole story here.

To join our campaign, please sign here.

Google uses many criteria in ranking web pages, one of which is the geographic location of the web page’s “IP” address. This is the address of the location where the website is hosted. The UK’s alternative energy sources are still too unreliable to provide a consistent service so the best way for UK businesses to have their websites hosted on servers using 100% green energy is to choose a hosting service based outside the country. If they do this, their rankings in Google’s UK search results are likely to fall because Google infers that a site hosted in the US is less ‘relevant’ to a UK search.
Given that Google’s share of UK searches is now in the region of two thirds, this could have potentially disastrous effects on any UK business that decides to cut its carbon emissions.