There’s an old saying; “Absolute power corrupts absolutely”. It seems that the saying holds true today, especially in the form of Google’s PageRank system. If you thought that the days of the Google Smack-down were over, think again. The boys and girls at the bog G are still fully engaged in the tactic of penalizing you for making use of the system that they created.

Google may call the practice of selling links unethical or a dilution of their algorithm, but let’s be frank. What happened was this”

1. Google created the PageRank system to identify the most popular or linked-to websites indexed by their system.
2. Google turned this information loose on the internet and the Internet at large adopted the system as a measure of popularity
3. Having adopted PR as the definitive ranking system (or at least the least flawed) advertisers started spending money based almost entirely on this measure of standing. High PR became gold, and people began working for it.
4. Google realized that people were using their system to sell links other than standard banners. (Paid reviews, links, and other various and sundries.) And decided in it’s infinite wisdom that nobody should be artificially creating links to a site that could increase that site’s PageRank in the Google system
5. Google moved to destroy the PageRank of any site engaged in the practice of making a buck by selling links (Or suspected of doing so, whether or not that was the case.)

In the end, it translates loosely to this:

What Google giveth, Google taketh away

This is a completely legal move on Google’s part. They own PR and the rights to it. They can determine whose rank gets displayed in browser rank meters or on Internet based PageRank checkers. In the purest sense of business, it makes perfect sense but in practice, it comes across as a bit childish and heavy-handed.

In my opinion it shouldn’t be the little guy that’s getting smacked, nor should Google be attempting to solve this perceived “problem” with abuse of their system by creating rules and penalties for the people that use it. They should look at their algorithms and figure out a way to ensure that PR can’t be artificially inflated.

We’re not talking about a bunch of back-room hackers anymore, we’re talking about Google. They have the resources to make the changes necessary to make this issue a moot point. Their offices they employ some of the most talented software designers and programmers in the world, en masse. It should take little or no time to divert a few dozen of them to solve this problem and be done with it. In their early days they probably would have, but not anymore.

Unfortunately, google has lost what once made it great. Instead of the slightly rebellious group of happy, free-thinking individuals that they started as, the company has stagnated. gone are the early days of the Internet, and with them has gone Google’s penchant for “thinking outside the box”. Instead of finding creative solutions for problems they encounter, they simply turn to their legal department.

In short, Google has become the corporate megalith it once railed against. Instead of seeking new and innovative ways of getting things done, the staff at Google worries over how shiny and polished its interface looks. Known issues in the underlying software of systems like blogger and gmail go unattended and ignored while teams of developers argue over the latest piece of code that will make a button prettier or allow more colors. Customer support and customer relations emails rarely, if ever get a reply.

Meanwhile the new generation of innovators is filing in to fill the void. Dissatisfied blogger users are flocking to WordPress in droves while Google focuses on new acquisitions. Izea has countered the PageRank system with their RealRank algorithm and they are gaining ground against the titan that is Google. Meanwhile, the big G is slow to respond to these new threats to it’s market share, but quick to penalize those that have helped build their success.

Frankly, I feel a bit slighted. I was there at the beginning. When I started working in the Internet industry all of us were new. We were all risk-takers and innovators. it was an exclusive club of people working in small offices with barely functional equipment and hands that shook from too much coffee or Mountain Dew. The smell of stale pizza and Doritos was the norm, not the exception.

We worked hard, we worked late and we laughed a lot. We learned, we shared and we grew. At some point those of us who still thought of it all as an adventure either became jaded or simply moved on to something that would stir our passion again. the Internet has become industry and that’s not what we were about.

I fear that soon there will be another great upheaval in the world that rivals or overshadows the legacy of the Dot Bomb era. In its infancy, the Internet created companies like Google. These companies in turn either swallowed or destroyed competitors that refused to adapt and expand into the new medium like sharks in a feeding frenzy.

The waters are beginning to stir again, full of small yet determined new companies, all circling the great established companies and looking for a weakness. The giants of yesterday have to remember what made them giants in the first place. If not, they’ll end up no more than memories, eaten alive by newer, hungrier competitors that are willing to take gigantic risks to stake their claim.

In short, Change is in the wind. Take it from an old-timer who watched the Internet become what it is. I’ve seen this before. The scary part is, so have companies like Google. At the time they were the sharks. Today they look more like a buffet, and the sharks are hungry.

If you’re like me and rarely read the Google AdSense TOS updates, you may have missed the new(ish) policy stating that all sites running AdSense ads must have a publicly displayed privacy policy.  As far as I know, Google hasn’t kicked anyone out of the program for not having one yet, but hey, who wants to be the first?

Not feeling particularly interested in writing a privacy policy page?  Neither was I.  Luckily, Serp Rank has the answer for us lazy types, or just those of us who can’t afford an attorney to write these things up for us.

Just pop over to the SerpRank Adsense Privacy Policy Generator and you’ll have yourself a privacy policy page in no time.  It may take a bit of tweaking if you use services that aren’t on their list, but it’s a small effort to modify a tiny bit of text, and you’ll never have to hire that lawyer.

Unless you get in some kind of trouble, that is…

Google’s PageRank smackdown has left a lot of bloggers bemoaning the loss of traffic and prestige their blogs recieve, but does having your Google PR wiped out or lowered really affect how many visitors you will get on a daily basis?

From my experience, the answer is a resounding “NO”.

The first of my blogs to get slapped for selling paid advertising was my food and recipe blog, Cooking… by the seat of my Pants! One day I had a Google PageRank of 3, with the hopes of easily making a 4 or a 5 on the next update. The next day I sat at a PR of 1, the following day I had a firm PR of Zero and it has sat at this level for over 3 months now. In that time my traffic has tripled and I have seen no loss of referrals from Google itself.

As a concrete example, on October 7th last year, when I still had a PR of 3, I received 17 referrals from Google searches.  On March 6th 2008 and with a PR 0, I got 84 visits from Goolge search referrals.  I’d call that a marked increase, wouldn’t you?

In the end, the loss of toolbar PageRank hasn’t cost me much of anything in the way of traffic or exposure. What the lack of measurable PageRank has affected is my ability to sell advertising. Since most companies that use the Internet as a marketing tool still use PageRank as their benchmark for ad pricing and availability, it has become difficult to sell any of the higher profile advertising that I was able to use in the past. I have hopes that advertisers will begin to look at Izea’s new RealRank as  aviable number in the future, but until then I am working on a few concepts that may get my PageRank reinstated without precluding selling a few advertisements here and there in the process.

That, however is another entry.

Sorry for the lack of posts over the past few days. I’ve been dead in the middle of a site redesign that I want to have finished by Christmas if possible, and all my time has been spent up to my ears in PHP code and CSS tweaks. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t been looking at my normal tech blogs or industry blogs, just that I haven’t had time to comment on them. I’ve been paying special attention to anything related to the “Great Google PageRank Scare of ’07″, and I’ve come up with a few interesting tidbits in the past week or so that I thought were worth sharing.

First of all, let’s just say this. If you’ve had your PR decimated by Google, you are guilty, at lest as far as they are concerned. If you are forced to ask for re-inclusion, you’ve got to promise them that you won’t make the same “violation” again. So just face it, you’re guilty, they’re never going to adopt a lenient policy and there’s no reason to expect them to. they made the rules, they helped to create the industry, and now they’ve “adjusted” their policy because they feel that people who get paid for advertising links are “polluting” the results.

An example of why they feel this way can be seen in this post from Matt Cutts. In this particular case, I agree with him. What Matt doesn’t seem to realize is that not all bloggers who write paid posts fail to do research on the topic. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons that I like Izea and PayPerPost is that I have six hours to post on a topic. I’ve been at this Internet thing for a while (I actually used it when it was still ARPANET), and I can come up with quite a bit of information in that amount of time. In fact, I’ve rejected opportunities on more than one occasion based on the research that I’ve done on a topic. I personally prefer to know that I’m not representing a snake oil company. I also strive to earn the loyalty and trust of my readers, so I try to have a clue about what I’m writing about.

That having been said, it is true that a great number of bloggers that accept paid posts don’t research at all. They focus instead on getting as many paid posts as possible in a day for as many blogs as they run. While this may translate in anything from a pleasant addition to an income to a full-time income in itself, it also means that there is no effort put into anything other than generating more money. This practice in advertising has been the downfall of print advertisers in the past, and it is my prediction that these practices will eventually be the downfall of those who do so on the web. Time and a lack of respect from readers will see to that.

While Matt is dissecting the reasoning behind Google’s rank slashing, Dustin Brewer has posted a very insightful article on adding nofollow tags to prevent you from being banned for paid links. This post is in my opinion, a must read if you are trying to come back from having your PageRank decimated as I have. Dustin also replied to my question regarding dofollow in comments. After weighing what he’s said and the fact that Andy Beard also allows link juice to trickle from comments on his site, I’ll be leaving my comments as dofollow in my new site revamp. (Be aware, I’m ruthless as far as which comments are allowed, and if you’re giving away followed links in comments, you should be as well.)

(This is just an aside, but Dustin is a mere few hours from me, and I think I may just take a trip to O.K. City if I ever need some help with a site design, the work his company does is pretty impressive.)

In totally non Google PageSlap news, Dosh Dosh put out a post that still has me thinking, titled The Flagship Blog Project: Creating Multiple blogs for Profit in 30 Day Cycles. It’s something I’m going to consider over the next few months, as i do have some domain names just “sitting around” that I might consider using to increase my revenue stream. The system looks like a lot of work, but then so is any project worth doing. I haven’t gone through every aspect of the post yet, there are other things I have to complete first, but when I do get to it, I’ll be sure to let you all know how it goes.

Oh yeah! John Chow changed the car in his header to the new Lambo.

What?

OK he had some pretty interesting things to say as well, but I can’t remember them because of that gorgeous machine’s headlights staring at me.

I’ve already stated that I took a hit to my Google page rank on any blog I host that is running Izea (formerly PayPerPost) sponsored ads.  The big G took this action a step further a few days ago and removed all PR from my primary blog, dropping it from a PR 3 to a PR2, then to a PR0 a few days later.  I had expected to just squeak in to a PR4 on this round of updates based on the number and quality of inbound links, but in Google’s eyes I have apparently violated the sanctity of their algorithm.

Originally I was concerned that Google would banish me from their search results as well, but that has not happened.  Actually, traffic from Google Search results has increased, if anything (something to do with a food blog and the holidays, I’m sure…  It’s my busy season.)

I know I’m not alone in this.  Andy Beard has posted several great articles on the subject, and I’ve been keeping up with what he has to say.  This one in particular is quite informative, and helped to put my mind at ease for getting dropped from the SERPs altogether.  I’m also completely revamping the site that was hit, so I’ll probably file a re inclusion request when done, though the only thing I can think of that I might have done to tick Google off is to have used paid posts, with disclosure and turn on dofollow on my comments. (This was done because I prefer t give a little automatic love to those who take the time to say something.  Unfortunately it has a price…)

If you’re running Izea on your site, you might want to consider this staement from the official PayPerPost blog:

We now know from some of our friends inside of Google (thanks “bob”) that they are now looking for phrases such as PPP, PayPerPost,ReviewMe, Payu2blog, etc. in the text of your post. For that reason I would suggest refraining from using any type of this text in the body of your posts, sponsored or not. When you disclose thank the sponsor, not PPP.

This is also something I had been doing, labeling sponsored articles as “PPP”.  It made things esy for me, but I’ll be going back through and changing this in the next few days.  One other thing I’m going to try is going back and either deleting any older paid inclusion posts. (posts older than the 30 day minimum) or at least changing all links to a rel=nofollow.  Hopefully this will keep Google a bit happier.

For now, my suggestion is that you subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed, he’s got the most reliable information I’ve found so far.

As promised, here’s part two in my ongoing reserch concerning PayPerPost and page rank.

Not many people seem to be screaming very loudly. AffiliateWatcher.com posted these thoughts concerning the latest move by Google. I tend to agree that there is little or nothing a blogger or even a group of bloggers can do to change the way the big “G” does business. They own the search engine, they make the rules, even though they don’t penlize themselves for doing th same thing they penalize others for.

Is it fair? No, but then business, especially multi-billion dollar business, has never been “fair”.

Andy Beard shares his thoughts on the recent Google updates with his usual insight, and like most, he’s not exactly happy about it. Andy had apparently been penalized a bit for using followed links in posts he’s made regarding companies he’s written about over the past 12 months.

If this is the case, I suppose I’m just going to have to accept the fact that all of my page rnkings are going to fall, since I’m a firm believer in NOT using nofollow tags. I can accept the validity of these tags, especially on huge sites where spam creeps in and skews rankings, but the fact is, all of my sites are fairly small, and I feel that the folks commenting on them deserve a little link-love from me for their effort. Also, if I’m writing an article and decide to link to someone from said article, it’s because I liked what they had to say, and I wanted to give them credit for it.

In the end I think this trend has just begun, and we’re all just going to have to ride it out. If you’re using PayPerPost, good news is coming. The new Argus release should shift dependency from pagerank to their own tracking system, though I’m not positive just how well Argus is going to perform over their current system.

All is not lost, however. With PayPerPost now llowing 3 posts per blog per day, there is still potential for earning some extra income. Just be sure that you’re putting up a ton of good content as well if you’re going to go that route. It’s also a good time to look into affiliate programs and other alternatives for making a few dollars off of your blog. If affiliate sles can earn the same amount as PayPerPost, you’ve just doubled your money with less than half the work. Not a bad plan at all.