For many new business owners, they are both exciting and worrisome, but they don’t get much worse than what Shivaun Raff and her husband, Adam, went through.
In June 2006, the couple’s groundbreaking pricing comparison website, Foundem, which they had created from the ground up and sacrificed well-paying jobs for, had just gone live.
Unbeknownst to them at the time, that day and the ones that followed would be the start of the end for their business.
One of Google’s automated spam filters had resulted in Foundem receiving a search penalty. It caused the website to appear far lower in the search results for pertinent terms like “comparison shopping” and “price comparison.”
This resulted in the couple’s website struggling to generate any revenue, as it charged a fee when users clicked on their product listings to access other websites.
Adam explains, “We were keeping an eye on our pages and their ranking, and then we saw them all plummet almost immediately.”
Even if Foundem’s launch day didn’t go as planned, it would mark the beginning of something else: a 15-year court struggle that ended with Google being fined a record €2.4 billion (£2 billion) for abusing its market dominance.
