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On the web, Google Page Rank (PR) is a major concern for webmasters and it affects the amount of search engine traffic and consequently income they earn from their website.
A high Google Page Rank drives more business to a website from the popular Google search engine. This is the basis of the latest investigation by the European Commission after 3 popular websites filed a complaint against the search engine giant for allegedly tampering with their page ranks.
The 3 companies in question
- Ciao (German based shopping portal owned by Microsoft).
- Foundem (U.K. based price comparison portal that has links to Microsoft).
- Justice.fr (French based legal information portal).
While no official investigation is currently being conducted, an anti-trust inquiry is underway where the European Commission has requested Google to comment on the claims.
Google's obvious stance was to highlight the fact that 2 of the 3 complainants involved are with Microsoft, their competitor, and hence put a cloud of doubt over the sincerity of the allegations. Julia Holtz, Google's anti-trust lawyer, affirmed that no such tampering was done on the 3 websites and that the alogrithm by which Page Rank is calculated is updated 200 times a year. These updates are to prevent any one individual or company from gaining undeserving dominance in search results.
The PageRank dip that the Foundem website had suffered was later restored, to which Google advised that the dip and subsequent rise in PR may have been caused by alterations Foundem website had done.
