Photo credit: Terms of Service // ShutterStockD’Agostino provided web development services to the Appliances Buy Phone (ABP) website. He wanted to sharpen his SEO skills, so he agreed in 2009 with the ABP owners to create a mirror version of ABP, called Appliances4Sale (AFS) as a test platform. D’Agostino would SEO and then share 50% in the resulting profits. In 2010, Google slapped both ABP and AFS with a duplicate content penalty. The ABP owners then shut down AFS to preserve traffic to ABP, and in August 2010, D’Agostino sued them and Google pro se. I previously blogged this lawsuit in 2011 when the court didn’t reject ABP’s counterclaim for negligent SEO services (it’s unclear from this ruling what happened to those counterclaims). Subsequently, the court rejected some of D’Agostino’s claims and a jury rejected the remainder. D’Agostino appealed, but the appellate court rejected his arguments, perhaps moving this…
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