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They can put you out of business if you get caught in one of their spam filters by accident, and you can't get out even if your website is clean.
You can loose thousands if not millions of dollars.
I wonder IF they can be held legally and financially responsible.
Google makes no promises about including or ranking sites and there is no consideration given in exchange for inclusion or ranking within their database at Google.
Can they be sued? Sure. There is one case in particular of someone trying to do that now. IMO its doubtful that the case will be successful but anyone is free to try if they can fund the case.
If you're robbing my house and I shoot you, and kill you, my estate can sue you and win, and you'll probably do time in prison as well. You should not have taken the law into your own hands, unless cornered and in self defense.
So don't be too quick to jump to conclusions on these search engine issues where material damage is done to someone else's business while venturing onto the search engine's cyberturf.
In business school they teach you to how to behave so as to avoid litigation. If a team of hungry lawyers gets on your case, you lose no matter what.
I guess if you can sue McDonalds because you spilled hot coffee on yourself or sue Burger King because the cheeseburgers made you fat anything is possible.
Should say:
If I'm robbing your house and you shoot me, and kill me, my estate can sue you and win, and you'll probably do time in prison as well. You should not have taken the law into your own hands, unless cornered and in self defense
Sorry, I probably shouldn't be making posts when I should be sleeping!
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Hmm...I think my sites deserve to be #1 on Google for "computers" and "travel". Can I sue just because I think I deserve this?
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No, I don't expect to be number anything. Just let my pages in the searchable Google database.
The only crime I'm guilty of is have multiple urls share the same website.
I did not do this to spam anyone. We just could not find the right URL for our type of business.
[webmasterworld.com...]
As soon as I realized what was going on, I separated my urls. Which caused even more problems and snowballed.
We have been trying to get our pages back in since 06/2002 and I estimate we lost 1/2 M...... in sales from this error. My error and was an honest mistake.
Now we do pay per click and rely on previous customers. The only real engines, right now, are Overture and Google.
Every time one of our pages from flxxYxxxMxxx.com does appear in Google, it does great. But does not last long and they disappear.
I guess it's time to throw in the towel and start all over with a new URL.
flxxxxxxMxxx.com is a clean URL. Hundred bucks to anyone who finds spam on our site.
I'm not the suing type of person; actually I won't even talk to people who do this.
If I fall into your swimming pool and drown, my estate can sue you and win. You should have put up safegaurds to keep me from getting hurt on your property.
A better analogy would be:
"If you choose to swim in my pool and I suspect that you've been urinating in the water, I'll throw you out because it's my pool and I have the right to keep it untainted."
