Ok so the title of this post kind of got your attention didn’t it? Before I end up flaming some of the corporations and anyone else I’m about to talk about here, let me first say that these are my opinions and should be taken ‘as-is’.
Google as we know is perhaps one of the biggest and most successful internet based companies around today. From search engines to internet advertising, Google holds the biggest market share in terms of revenues. To think that Google started as a company only recently about 10 years ago and is giving internet giant Yahoo a hard time. The recent news of Microsoft’s possible takeover of Yahoo created some excitement over at the Google camp. Anti-trust or whatever you want to call it, I’d say if the Federal government takes you to court because you are too darn big, that’s a pretty good position to be in ain’t it?
Anyway, sometime back, I joined PayPerPost (PPP) as an affiliate/paid reviewer. The whole deal behind it was that I got paid anything from USD5 to USD50 per article. Given the fact that I used to post everyday on my blogs, I signed-up and registered all my blogs for the service. On an average month with minimal effort, I was making an additional USD100 to USD200. Logging into my PayPal account and seeing my earnings there every week sure felt good. So it was all cool for me and a large number of my readers and fellow bloggers who decided to go the PayPerPost (PPP) way. Then more and more companies like Smorty and what have you started popping up.
In late 2007, Pro Affiliate Income went from a PR4 to PR0 overnight. It had took me just about 6 months to achieve PR4. Not that it’s a great PageRank to brag about but it was respectable. Even this blog which was at PR4 (after 4-5 months of active posting) dropped to PR0. Overnight, folks all over reported a drastic drop in PageRanks. Blogs with PR 5-7 fell to a PR of 2-3. So what the heck was going on? Some folks started to figure out something. Google was coming down hard on blog that use blog review services like PPP to increase search engine rankings, PR and awareness.
Speculation led to bloggers believing that the PPP Disclosure Badge was the reason. A line of JavaScript code that we had to paste on our blogs to indicate that we publish paid blog reviews was apparently the heat signature for Google to home in and shoot us all where we were not expecting it. The result? Mayhem and outrage in the blogging community. Google being as they are stuck to what they were doing. In a matter of days, the PageRanks of blog everywhere took a massive beating. I’m pretty sure Google would have defended their position and stated it was for the interest of their advertisers.
Since then, I have dropped PPP from the list of programs I participated in. Removed banners, codes and sorts related to them. IZEARanks (under the owners of PPP) started not too long ago and is still in what I would say a beta development stage. Installing the code screwed up my blogs too. Somehow, the codes forced a pop-up window. As with any internet user, the last thing I need is a pop-up window for fear of a possible trojan or malicious attack attempt on my machine.
Is this Google’s tyranny on the internet advertising market? Well, I’m not sure. All I do know is that I do make a decent income from AdSense through contextual ads and even FeedBurner (which has since been acquired by Google). Much more than Text-Link-Ads in fact. Speaking of which, did you know that you can be penalized by Google for not attributing ‘rel=nofollow’ on your paid ads links? Further, I don’t like to have my PR affected negatively because of some social networking, advertising or blog review activity. I’ll just have to wait for the next Google PageRank Update and see what happens.
Technorati Tags: Google AdSense,Google PageRank,Search Engine,Blog Reviews,PayPerPost,Microsoft,Text-Link-Ads,Google PageRank Update,Penalized by Google
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