Google Keeps on Screwing Us!

Posted By: Bob Buskirk on November 21st, 2007
13 Comments... What do you have to say?

It seems it is just one thing after another with Google. First off a while ago Google slapped people’s pageranks who were using Text Link Ads on their websites. A lot of sites got huge penalties some even going from pagerank 9 to 4! The thing about pagerank is people will pay for that. It is how a lot of advertisers look at your site and how it is gauged. Just this past week Google once again slapped people who use another service rather than adsense, this time it was PayPerPost. It seems they are dropping the pageranks for these sites down to 0!

Then just recently Google has changed their Adsense ads as well. Before the entire ad and surrounding area was clickable, now only the title and URL are! You can see what I mean from the picture below. So if you are an Adsense publisher it is likely that your CTR and overall income will go down. This is killer for people who are dependent on Adsense.

So how do I feel about this? Well I was slapped by Google! ThinkComputers pagerank went from a 5 to a 3 and this blog’s pagerank went from a 4 to a 0! For the longest time I thought Google was the good guy, but now since more of their business is online advertising rather than search it seems like they are becoming that bad guy. They have about 60% market share in search and I guess they think if you are not using their advertising solutions and are using someone else’s they should penalize you! It seems like foul play to me.

Even people who have done link trains and contests on their blogs are being hit, even de-index by Google! So what to do? Should I drop Text Link Ads? I don’t see Google giving me that extra income each month! And if I replaced TLA with one of Google’s stupid link units it would not make anywhere near as much as what TLA makes me. But a lot of bloggers are dropping these services. I’m sure that pisses off TLA and PayPerPost. It seems like Google is forcing people to use their service instead of these alternative services by doing things like lowering pageranks to stop people from using these other services.

Anyone could say stop using Google for search. Even if a lot of people do that they will probably still uphold their market share and c’mon we all know they do have the best search out there. I think their actions will make their pagerank system obsolete and people will really start looking at what they are doing and see the foul play. As you can see from their stock it fell when they implemented the new ads.

I think what I’m going to do is become less dependent on all Google services. I’ve already dropped the main Google ad on this site and I want to drop Google on ThinkComputers. Also I’m not that worried about rankings for ThinkComputers as most of our traffic comes from affiliate sites. If you are pissed at Google you might want to try to use other sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to get traffic. In closing all I have to say is bad play Google…

Posted in: The Net
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13 Responses to “Google Keeps on Screwing Us!”

Thomas De Maesschalck said on November 21st, 2007 at 9:52 am

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

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David Lithman said on November 21st, 2007 at 11:15 am

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.

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Bob Buskirk Reply:
November 21st, 2007 at 11:41 am
yeah we are in a Google controlled internet

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Living Room Furniture Reply:
November 22nd, 2007 at 12:21 am
That is the problem: Google owns the internet, it is all pervasive and omni present. And now it is using its awesome power to be an imperialist dictator.

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Gary Lee said on November 21st, 2007 at 12:09 pm

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!

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Greg said on November 21st, 2007 at 1:25 pm

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.

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Thomas De Maesschalck Reply:
November 21st, 2007 at 2:25 pm
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=goog

It’s already back at +$660.

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BigMan said on November 21st, 2007 at 1:32 pm

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.

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Stephen said on November 21st, 2007 at 3:31 pm

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.

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Hair Loss Treatment said on November 22nd, 2007 at 12:10 am

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.

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Mike Huang said on November 22nd, 2007 at 4:23 am

Google will always be on TOP no matter what happens.

-Mike

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TDave said on November 22nd, 2007 at 4:41 am

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.”

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Ed Kohler said on November 22nd, 2007 at 1:50 pm

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

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