Forum Moderators: goodroi
Overall, the court sided with the plaintiff at virtually every juncture, even using some pretty jaw-droppingly dubious legal conclusions to do so, so this ruling hardly could have gone worse for Google. Still, there’s no certainty the plaintiff will win this case. Court Rules Google Must Face Trial Over Site Removals From SERPs [forbes.com]
If, for whatever reason, the plaintiff actually makes real substantive progress in this lawsuit, the implications for Google could be seismic. The plaintiff’s allegations go to the core of Google’s search indexing practices. If Google can’t freely decide to downgrade or de-index what it considers to be “pure spam,” then Google faces liability pretty much any time it automatically or manually rejiggers its index (which always creates some winners and some potentially-litigious losers).
