It’s Google’s right to rank websites how they see fit. When Google was “doing no evil” and only “organizing the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” I was a big fan. One of their biggest, most vocal supporters. I sent them a great deal of business and helped build their reputation.
Google has become morally bankrupt. Or at least, fallen victim to it’s own ego.
Google has taken to stripping even more sites of their PR scores? Why? Nobody knows though there is a lot of speculation these sites are involved with “pay per post”.
Pay per post comes from sites like reviewme.com where people looking for publicity are lined up with bloggers in their industry. The blogger writes a post giving their impressions of the product or service. Obviously a link to the reviewed product happens in the post.
According to Google engineer Matt Cutts this is not ok:
- Yet another “pay-for-blogging” (PFB) business launched, this time by Text Link Brokers. It should be clear from Google’s stance on paid text links, but if you are blogging and being paid by services like Pay Per Post, ReviewMe, or SponsoredReviews, links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. The rel=”nofollow” attribute is one way, but there are numerous other ways to do paid links that won’t affect search engines, e.g. doing an internal redirect through a url that is forbidden from crawling by robots.txt.
Google has crossed the line from organizing information to telling us how to present it.
According to Google, the only ad platform that is “not evil” is this one… and maybe this one. Though I can’t imagine why.
It is ok to have information on your website. It is not ok to make money from that information unless you run it through Google first (and they get their cut).
I can’t believe more people aren’t upset about this! Who do you want to control information? Who do you want to decide how the internet should work? Who do you want to decide how you may or may not earn an income? Do you want to be an indentured servant of Google?
Chances are you already are and just don’t know it yet.
Starting today Google is banned from 14th Colony.
Who knows, maybe I’ll calm down in a day or two and decide I’ve been hasty. Or maybe I’ll decide I should have done this a long time ago.
Right now, I just hope just 3 other people think real hard about this and make a similar move. I know my small protest won’t effect change. But if a few people join me, maybe a few people will join them too.
Will you be one of the 3?
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