The article was about Dr Marc Pinter-Krainer founder of an U.K based news aggregator One News Page whose website mysteriously vanished from Google for 9 months and then mysteriously appeared back.
In the interview, Dr Marc talks about how the penalty caused him financial loss due to lost traffic. He reached out to Google to see why the penalty was imposed in the first place. He filled up something know as a reconsideration form and posted to Google. However that only seemed to be a one way communication. There was no response back from Google. In the form he explained that he was adhering to all guidelines and that the penalty should be removed.
Dr Marc also asked help of an expert to review his website, however he also found that there was no violation of the guidelines. Thereafter another request was sent to Google but to not avail.
Dr Marc also reached out to Google’s senior management via a contact and also published a piece in the newspaper on this.
Dr Marc explained that this cost him lost of revenue and traffic directly resulting from penalty and his business was set back by 9 months, as he was only trying to find new ways to get the penalty removed.
There is still confusion as to what really triggered the penalty in the first place.
In Canada, Google is gateway to the internet and gatekeeper has 92% market share and therefore there is only one provider to determine which website gets traffic and which get denied. This is a real concern.
Dr March suggested that there should be more completion between several search engines