What if a search engine blocked a company who cut back its PPC spending, from appearing in non-paid search results?
That is exactly what Renren Information Services is accusing Baidu.com, China’s leading search engine, of.
Renren says that Baidu.com basically blackballed the site, after the company dramatically lowered its PPC spending with Baidu
Renren is suing Baidu for the equivalent of $161,000 in damages, and the case in currently at trial in a court in Beijing.
For a public company with a valuation of over 7 billion dollars, that’s basically a small claims case.
But this case is putting the search engine’s reputation and business ethics on trial.
According to Reuters, “Renren told the court the number of visits to its website dropped sharply after it reduced its spending with Baidu,”
According to the Renren, a search for the company’s sponsored subsidiary had returned over 80,000 page results while it was heavily running its PPC campaign but when it reduced the ad buy substantially, the same search yielded just 4 results.
Would a public company be so brazen to tie in natural search results with the amount spent on PPC advertising?
Stay tuned.
“Would a public company be so brazen to tie in natural search results with the amount spent on PPC advertising?”
Hi,
Back in the day when Frank Schilling was publishing his blog at SevenMile.com,
he commented more than once that Google blocks many of his (parked) domains
from appearing in Google search results.
Even if you typed in the exact domain name, “i.e. KeywordDomain.com”,
it would not appear in the search result.
Frank Schilling was/is using the Yahoo Partner Network to run ads that appear on his domains.
Translation: PPC ad $ for Yahoo not for Google.
I often wondered if that was the reason Google blocked Frank’s (and other’s) parked domains from search results.
Now Google offers their Adsense For Domains program directly to
domain holders so parked domains must be appearing in Google’s search
results or otherwise what’s the point?
I wonder if Google would still block Frank’s domains if they were running Google’s ads.
What do you think?
Patrick
Google and Yahoo typically blocks parked domains, because they don’t regard them as having content worthy of being ranked.
This is for all parked domains, not just Frank’s.
This is why many people are moving to mini-sites, which do contain some content and allow for search engine ranking.
What Baidu is accused of here, is much different and much more serious as it puts into question its basic search results.
Okay ,understood.
But something that always struck me as wrong is Google
(and maybe Yahoo) will block an exact domain search.
Hypothetical example:,
Yyou type “FriedRice.com” into Google.
The domain is registered and is parked.
However Google shows no search results for FriedRice.com.
(This is just hypothetical.)
However you slice it, I think it’s wrong to block it since that is
the exact search term sought as opposed to a search for just
“Fried Rice”.
Although Google blocks parked domains they don’t block them all.
I wonder why.
Patrick
You have to make the parked pages, look like its not just a parked page.
check out:
visitpuertorico.com
financialstability.com
both parked pages with Google PR
“check out:
visitpuertorico.com
financialstability.com”
Very nice looking sites.
Thanks..