Stumbling through a series of blogs I noticed that the debate over Google punishing sites for selling text links has flaired up again.
Having read over Danny Sullivan’s post, while I agree with some of the points, I think it’s important to state why I disagree with others. First of all, I feel like Google is telling me what to do with my site. It seems hypocritical that I am being told I cannot sell text links on my website from a website which generates the majority of it’s revenue from selling text links!
Secondly, yes I am free to ignore Google if I wish, continue selling text links, Google can’t tell us what to do. But of course, in reality, they can. Google provides a huge amount of traffic, often more than any other source. They effectively have a monopoly on search engine traffic so we have to follow their guidelines. When Microsoft abuse their massive market share there is public outcry, competition commission get involved, etc. But when Google say “you’re not allowed to make any money from simple text links anymore if you want anyone to visit your website” few people seem to see a problem with it.
On that point, I think it is also important to point out that Google is explicitly doing this maliciously. This isn’t a few algorithm roll-out designed to re-adjust the search engine results so that you get better results. A lot of it is human review of websites to decide whether they are making money or not and punishing them accordingly.
Finally, it’s certainly worth noting that there will be civilian casualties from this move. Because, when it comes down to it, there is no way to differentiate between sites that are buying and selling links to gain PR and sites that are just buying and selling links innocently. How about sites such as my network which aren’t even selling links but just link to each other? I mean, are hyperlinks just banned now or what?
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This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 1:08 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.