BobBuskirk.com

Lets hope they send us a nice Christmas gift to make up for all the trouble

I’m with you Bob. Google is killing the little man. You wish you could do something about it. You wish you could just say ’screw it’ and go some other route, but you can’t. If you want to be in this business then you’re stuck dealing with Google’s antics.

i’ve been talking with a lot of yahoo people and it seems they have something up their sleeves in the next couple of years . . . . it should give Google a run for their money . . . ok, maybe a run for some of their money!

Bad move on Google’s part. Their stock dropped over $50 in 3 days because of this. Now the question is, is it going to go back up? I doubt it.

I agree on this, rbmods.com dropped from 5 to 0 but I still get the same traffic from Google as before, I am confused.

There’s no doubt that Google needs to pull their heads out of their asses with the recent bitch slapping, but the change in the ads aren’t such a bad thing. In fact, this should improve the user experience.

I always end up clicking on those things by accident and get taken somewhere else, not the site I was looking at. I’ve even done it by accident on my own sites. I realize that this change will decrease the click through rate somewhat, but it will also allow you to keep your readers on your page longer and not piss them off, never to return.

It’s hard to say whether what is happening is right or wrong. Penalizing sites which buy text links has worked good for the genuine sites, who have worked their way hard to get to the top by all white hat methods. Sites which have not bought links have had an increase in their PR.

Google will always be on TOP no matter what happens.

-Mike

Bob,

Sorry to hear about those Google penalties. I had one drupal site that I installed a TLA module on drop from 4 to 3, but the weird thing is I never sold any links on it. I guess google just saw TLA’s javascript and penalized me. Not really a big deal for that site and I have seen no drop in my search rankings.

There are a lot of people that are pissed with Google right now - and rightly so. Wendy Piersall from emomsathome recently wrote a post that I replied to. She made a good point - that paid text link ads have been around longer than Google. If Google keeps taking this stance I think you are gonna 1) see a lot more people get pissed at Google; 2) you are gonna see somebody, or a group of people, sue Google for millions/billions of dollars.

I don’t blame Google for protecting their search ranking algorithms, but they should not be punishing publishers. It’s expecially questionable as those penalties directly effect their advertising competitors. I wouldn’t be suprised to see TLA and some of these ReviewMe sites file that lawsuit I mentioned.

Google can obviously determine which sites to penalize, so they have the capability to just disregard certain links coming from those sites. It costs google money to find the culprits either way, so instead of ticking everyone off they should just disregard those sites instead of trying to play “Sherriff of the Internet.”

As an advertiser, I’ll pay Google more for traffic that converts better than the accidental clicks you’ve been profiting from.