ShopCity: Latest Publisher To File Antitrust Complaint Against Google

By Barry Schwartz

Published: November 15, 2011 at 9:28 am

Store Google Is Target of ShopCity Antitrust Complaint to FTC from Bloomberg News reports yet another FTC antitrust complaint was filed against Google. This time the complaint was filed by ShopCity, a service aimed at helping local businesses sell products online.

The complaint was filed on November 11th by Gary Reback, an antitrust lawyer at Carr & Ferrell LLP in Menlo Park, California, who wrote “From the day ShopCity launched its network, the upstart competitor faced the full measure of Google’s anticompetitive tactics.”

Google’s Adam Kovacevich told Bloomberg the reason ShopCity doesn’t rank well is because the “company was violating Google’s guidelines against duplicate and auto-generated content — which our users tell us they don’t like.” Adam added, “we twice offered the company advice on how to improve their websites.”

ShopCity said they did listen to Google’s advice but have yet to achieve higher rankings from implementing the tips Google offered. Gary Reback, ShopCity’s lawyer, said Google did increase their rankings in June after receiving the subpoena from the FTC but since then their rankings have both increased and decreased over the months. Maybe, just maybe, those had to do with the Panda update?

ShopCity is one of many companies suing Google for anticompetitive practices, many have similar complaints and most will lose in court.

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About the author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.