Hi Chris,

Thanks for writing about the filing.

Sorry, that should have been clarified as ‘Midland, Ontario’, which is a community in Canada where we have a pilot project (http://www.shopmidland.com.

There are so many Midlands that you need to specify the state/province.

And that comment, in general, applies to results everywhere for everyone serving the local business market; what used to be ‘first’ in the organic results is now ‘first, below the Google local results’, and that is what Gary meant.

Our primary issue with Google is not one of ranking, though that plays into it, it is one of ‘manual penalization’. Google has admitted to overriding the automated algorithm to block our content from appearing where it would naturally because they have issues with our business model of using multiple domains.

If all of our content was on one domain, they would treat it differently, and have suggested we run a single domain in the Google Webmaster forums.

If we were to do that, we would be at a significant disadvantage, as localized domains are what enable us to attract partners who want to promote only the businesses in their community. Localized domains also help overcome the inaccuracies caused by IP-based geolocation systems, and also enable us to effectively make use of traditional offline marketing in the communities we serve.

To change our model to a single domain would put us at a significant disadvantage, and in our eyes, would remove the competitive threat that we pose to Google’s local initiatives, which are IP-based and online-only for the most part.

Google themselves have recently begun using localized domains in their campaign to bring small businesses onboard (read about Google buying hundreds of geo domains), which is another reason why their requests seem hypocritical and anticompetitive.

We are not gaming the system in any way – we block duplicate content, ask not to be indexed where we do not have content, do not interlink sites, etc., but Google still found reason to penalize our sites, even though they are providing consumers with information they want, that other sites do not offer.

In order to get them to re-include our sites in their search results, we have had to severely handicap our business in ways that other companies, and Google themselves are not required to do (ex. blocking ‘unclaimed’ businesses from being indexed with meta tags, etc.)

It’s most perplexing when Google states that our sites do not meet their quality guidelines, but then cite them under Google Places, or when they say they contain duplicate content that warrants a penalty, but sites that scrape our content are allowed to rank.

This inconsistency leads one to question whether they are simply choosing to penalize companies they do not wish to gain traction with consumers, and certainly creates the appearance of anticompetitive behavior.

We are hardly the only company to face these issues, however, most are too concerned with backlash from Google to come forward. We were in the same position when they did their first round of penalties against our sites, but left others to operate normally. We didn’t want to risk them shutting us down completely. However, when they did shut us down in July, we had nothing to lose so began challenging them openly.

After the initial story broke in July, we were finally able to obtain a response from Google – before that, it was simply form letters saying we didn’t meet their quality guidelines.

We filed the complaint because we feel that the FTC should conduct a serious investigation into Google’s use of their web search monopoly to prevent competitors from reaching consumers, and we have had an outpouring of support from other companies that have been affected.

ShopCity.com was recently asked to join the advisory board of FairSearch.org, and we also launched ShopLocally.com to provide our partners and business members with another channel to reach consumers.