There is no question that the higher you rank in Google the better, but there are times when you can take that importance a bit too seriously.

The other day, my friend Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins shared an item on Google Reader from a site named Business Pundit that literally took my breath away.

It is actually difficult to tell if this was someone’s lame attempt at a joke, or if someone actually thought they could use intimidation to get what they wanted, but either way it is shocking.  The short version is that someone received an email telling them they needed to remove their site from Google’s search engine because the other party felt they didn’t belong, and they were outranking them.  They needed to remove their site or face legal action.  Here is the email as it was posted (I did edit the Google Chat window to hide the names of this person’s contacts):

After I picked up my jaw and stopped laughing at the absurdity of this email, I had to wonder if someone would ever actually fall for something like this.

The higher you rank in a search engine the better, but to threaten someone with lawsuits is a new one on me.  Most people work on their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to increase their ranking, but perhaps it would be easier to just threaten those with better SEO than you off the search engine so you don’t actually have to work on it?  True, this person says they have optimized their site, but you can always do a bit more tweaking.

In short, no, someone can not sue you for being ranked higher than them in a search engine no matter if they say you don’t belong on that keyword or not.  I would hope no one else would ever attempt using this tactic, but if one person did it, it is almost certain that someone somewhere else has tried it, or may try it.  Don’t fall for this, and if you ever do get an email like this, merely laugh it off, go about your day … oh, and share it for the world to get a laugh.