scriptygoddessSo I've seen a few blogs talking about how Google is now punishing sites that sell link advertising, by downranking their sites. I've now seen this firsthand on scriptygoddess. It used to have a page-rank of 6 – and now it is a pagerank 43. I've seen other sites (good sites with good content) get downranked.
I know I'm probably stating the obvious – but I think its outrageous that Google wants to hurt sites that have good, valueable content, just because they'd like to make some cash for their work. What exactly is "wrong"/"bad" by my making some money for my effort? For a long time I had scriptygoddess remain up, and posted information I had learned – out of the goodness of my heart. But when I started working for myself to help make ends meet – it made sense to put up advertising on the site to help that end as well. I tried to be clear about which links are sponsored links. While it would have been lucrative to use those “inline” advertising links (where they link text right in your own post to advertisements) I didn't go that route because I felt it gave a bad user experience. Some links were intentional – and others were advertising and how could you tell the difference without mousing over or clicking on it? Annoying.
The biggest joke of all this, is of course, Google isn't punishing sites that ONLY contain GOOGLE advertising (which, by the way, pay the least/worst of any advertising I've contracted with)
On the whole, and up until now, I thought Google's been a pretty cool company but this move is just plain bad. Back before the dot-com bust – many sites were designed to draw revenue strictly from advertising. The business models didn't work out quite right – but I think I've been seeing a revitalization to that idea – the right advertising can support a website. And what is Google trying to do? Completely smush it and stop progression.
And I think it will eventually come back to bite them. I've found recently that when doing searches strictly through Google, I've found myself going back through their pages a lot more than I used to – and in some cases never finding what I had needed to. So by downranking sites with valuable information, they've pushed them further back in the list of pages, and maybe in some cases, pushing some sites so far back that you'd never find them *making their own search engine not as useful as before*.
I hope they re-think this idea.
Edited to add: The more I think about this, and the more I read, the more I have to laugh. Google is playing "link-police" from what I understand because their complaint is that selling links puts less-relevant sites up on top when you do searches – and that you're not allowed to "buy" that position. Right. That's why when I do searches on Google, top of the page, and all along the side are links for sites that BOUGHT that position. So really what they're saying is it's only ok when you're paying GOOGLE. *no one else should be making money* except for them. I think it's definitely time to change my default search engine!
