Has Google Been Unfair to Small Business

Has Google been unfair to small business?

When referring to an “unfair businessman”, most people will come up with an image of a snobbish merchant like a shoe dealer treating customers differently, which is often according to the social and financial status possessed by different clients. It may be surprising to find that the giant in the internet industry, Google, is acting similarly, as many small business owners complained in recent ten years. For one thing, Google has been discriminating small website owners by providing less sufficient explanation on the penalty they receive than that provided for big firms. For another, Google has been taking the content from small websites for its own use without permission and daunting them with penalty.

Small websites complained that after the sudden block from Google, they asked Google for a reason but received no explicit reply, therefore suspended at vast expense. “There was no explanation why or place you could go for more information,” said Hal Goodtree, the editor and publisher of a local news site CaryCitizen after it dropped into the blacklist of Google. The several-month suspension is painful since the site lost the recognition from Google, with which a newspaper is considered legit. Similar situations also occur on other small websites including Kinderstart, which has declared a loss of around 80% of its sale because of the suspension. Had Google provided an explicit reason, the small business could have remedied and reverted at once.

In contrast, more leeway for quick recovery has been provided for powerful clients including BMW and J.C Penney. In 2006, Google announced that it had caught BMW using a black-hat strategy to bolster the company’s German Website, BMW.de. Having admitted the use of doorway pages and done some corrections, BMW quickly recovered from this storm. J.C.Penney, a major retailor in the American toy industry and a company among fortune 500, is also punished for violating contraction with...