Google, Iran and Tomedes

[tomedes]

Hi,

I'm the manager of a translation service named Tomedes. We serve businesses worldwide translating dоcuments between nearly 100 languages by professional human translators.

Since Tomedes headquarters is in Israel, we have made a decision a couple of years ago not to serve Iranians at all in order to avoid political issues. However, we did not update Google about this decision – Tomedes is ranked 1st in Google search for "Professional Persian translation" and over a dozen other keywords related to Persian translation.

In the last few months over 50k visited Tomedes searching for Persian and Farsi translations, nearly all from Iran. They have contacted us via email, live chat and phone and we had to politely decline all of them.

We have done our best to convince Google we would rather Tomedes to be ranked first for any other language other than Persian by removing both internal and external links to Persian translation pages on Tomedes.com. Yet, our rank has not changed.

Luckily, Mr. Ahmadinejad has helped us out by banning Google in his country. For a few days now, the traffic from Iran has declined dramatically and we can only hope we will have the honor to serve Iranians soon.