The (Other) End of the Internet

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I’ve been quietly watching this develop for the last several months and, after what I was told this morning, I can’t keep my mouth shut any longer.

It started last June, when Google was due to release the quarterly page rank updates. Anyone who has a website and wants people to actually visit that site is familiar with Google’s page rank system and how a low ranking can spell the death of a website. Page Rank is intended as an indicator of how much traffic a site gets as well as the “quality” of incoming links. A link from a high-traffic site like CNN is seen as a “higher quality” link than one from, say, this blog. ;/

Well, June came and went with no update. So did July, August, September, and October.

During this time rumors started circulating that people who put the occasional paid review or contextual link into their blogs were going to be penalized. I tried to pass this off as speculation, right up until I watched several blogs with a Page Rank of 3 drop to a PR0 when there had been no noticeable change in traffic in months. Here is a quote from one of those blogs which sums up my feelings on the subject quite nicely:

As for Google and any “punishment” they may be meeting out… My pagerank on this blog has gone from 3 to 2 and then to 0. Yet my traffic hasn’t fallen at all. I am one of a growing number of people who are deciding that pagerank is only useful as an indicator of what Google thinks and is NOT the be-all end-all of SEO and promotion. It’s just one of many factors to consider and not the most important by a long shot. (in fact, I think it’s getting less important every day)

HERE is the full article.

What got me hot enough under the collar to write this post is that this morning I read that if your blog has been “Google spanked” because you got paid for writing a post about platform beds (for example) and you haven’t deleted the post and emailed The Great And Powerful Google to apologize for your horrible infraction by January, then your blog will be quietly removed from Google’s search results.

Google seems to have developed a bit of a superiority complex.

It has become painfully obvious to me that the Google Page rank does not, in fact, reflect ANYTHING about a particular website or blog other than what Google thinks of it. I, frankly, am sick of worrying about what Google thinks. I designed the image below and have put it in my sidebar where the Google AdSense nonsense was. That image has given me more satisfaction in the last week than the $3.64 that Google’s NonSense has earned me in the last 2 years.

I’m encouraging everyone I can to use Ask.com’s search engine instead of Google and I’ve implemented the changes listed in this article so that my browser doesn’t use Google for searches.

If you have a blog or website, please consider making the changes discussed above and then display this logo on your site:

Please copy the image and place it on your own server instead of “hot linking” this one.

If enough people get together and tell Google where to go, maybe their actions will start being a little more reasonable.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google+spank, Spanking+Google, seo, page+rank

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