Google Hits your Pocket

It was so well scened that honestly I almost believed at what Google was saying and not what the big smart guys were telling us about Google and penalization. The big G first told us not to sell or buy links and the scene behind that (as they told us) was not to trick Google’s algorithm.

When that news came out on Matt Cutts on how to report paid links some of the big guys like Aaron Wall the author of SEO Book blogged about and did actually saw what was behind the scene why all this penalization talk.

I could honestly not believe that Google was hitting our pocket and was announcing War to all those webmasters that do make profits online by selling text links on their high PR site. I was convinced that the War was announced to those that trick their algorithm, and with tricking the algorithm I intend building backlinks in not a natural way which includes online contests where users get award prices in goods, money or books but to participate in such contests there are some rules like

• Linking to the contest page
• Commenting to the contest page
• Subscribing to their RSS

Asking for webmasters to link to your contest page and homepage is not what I would call natural linking as Google would like us to gain some links. Natural linking is that link that a webmaster you do not know has read your post, liked it and wants to share it with his readers and links to the post but you don’t ask him to do so. That is what I would call natural linking, or at least thats what Google has taught us what they call a natural link. But asking for backlinks to participate in a contest is not tricking the algorithm no?

Commenting on the contest page, bloggers love this and tend to have as much comments as possible for couple reasons. If you have a google sitemap plugin installed, each time you receive a new comment on a post of yours the blog will automatically ping the Google spider and inform that the page they previously crawled has been updated and there is a new content that needs to be crawled. The second reason why us bloggers love comments is because the get free content that increases the probabilities to be found on search engines as comments are considered content. But that is not tricking the algorithm no?

Subscribe to RSS, i am okey with this as this doesn’t have nothing to do with search engines but it does have to with other marketing aspects.

Why I don’t Believe in Google anymore

Lets rewind our memory and take a look at what has happened just few months ago. Google penalized directories and I was fine with that because most of the directories were useful site that were filling the SERPs with useless information. If you performed a search query in Google a month ago for the term “web hosting” all you would be able to find were web hosting review directories which had done a great search engine optimization and were ranking very well (great SEO because most of them require linking back to them if you wanted to be submitted or paying for listing). Oh well, paying for listing..so web hosting directories had the chance to advertise in a web directory that was ranking better than them in the SERPs by paying a one year or one time flat price or if they wanted to be on the featured sites list they had to pay just a small monthly fee, unlike if they had to advertise their business through Google AdWords where they had to spend most probably a lot of money. Could this be a reason why they were hit? Most probably, but web directories like Best of The Web (apart the fact that they are quality web directories) that don’t have sidewide features sites links (instead they have category sponsorship) were not affected by this penalization. While V7N Directory got a drop in PageRank since they do have a features sites on the sidebar (a pitty tho, wonder how John Scott did not thought about this before, he is doing pretty well with listings only).

Than Google penalized the link seller, the best case I could take for this is John Chow the dot com mogul. Penalizations on John Chow went heavy, first he got penalized on SERPs and he was not only no longer ranking on the first page for the term make money online but he wasn’t ranking nowhere in the first 3 pages even for his own name.

I bet you did saw what these type of sites (the recent pagerank horned folks, the directory owners and the link sellers) have in common, in case you didn’t it is Money. Thats right, all of these folks have web sites with high traffic and audience where one could advertise for cheaper than with AdWords and most probably receive the same benefits in traffic and conversion.

What made me blog about this

The main reason why I am blogging about this are the Google lies since the very beginning and because I was so blind to trust them. The latest case of ProBlogger which was pagerank horned as well and now has gained back its current PR6 even tho (for me) they were tricking the all so mighty Google’s algorithm with the contests (such contests as many other webmasters were running lately to gain some link love and traffic).

So it is not at all about the algorithm or what so ever, they hit our pocket because that way we can’t hit their golden pocket (AdWords). It all makes sense to me now, where I come from we say “If you hit my pocket I will hit your brain“, a pitty tho that I am the small guy and he is the Big G (it is wise not to fight with bigger guys, unless you have something strong on your hands).

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