Sat 17 Nov 2007
When I was at school there were certain teachers that would punish a whole class because one boy broke the rules.
To my mind those teachers were ignorant.
They were ignorant because there is no fairness or justice in punishing a whole classroom full of innocent kids because one boy broke the rules. I personally grew up with a very strong sense of justice and fairness and I positively boil when I see injustice being done by anyone in a position of power. Especially when that person has a choice. The choice to be fair or to be ignorant.
Google in their position of immense power are not being fair in their slapping down of small blogs that write paid reviews to make a few dollars. Maybe they don’t care, after all, they make billions of dollars so why should they care that one blogger who, for whatever reason might rely solely on those few dollars they make with their blog.
What if that blogger is disabled and can’t make any money by working at a normal job?
Do they even stop to think about that?
So they have put their foot down and by doing so will punish everybody because a few people break their rules. Take no prisoners, right?
Is it so bad that small bloggers write reviews that include a little link juice (and I mean little - I’m not talking about high PR blogs here) to the sponsors who want to pay for them?
It’s not like they’re simply putting up a link and getting a regular monthly payment for it. Reviews are one-off and the link gets buried in the blogs archive. Reviews take some time and thought to write and provide relevant information about the product or service they’re reviewing. If the blogger gets paid for writing a quality review isn’t that fair? If that review contains a bit of link juice as a part of its reason for being isn’t that also fair? To write a review about a product that you think is really useful and then link to the owner of that product and NOT get paid for it - is that wrong too?
Or is it the getting paid part of it that is perceived as wrong?
In all fairness, the ones to punish should be the ones buying their way to the top!
There will always be a system of supply and demand and as long as there is the demand for link juice, there will be people who will want to make a few bucks for supplying this. It works in any industry. People like to drink a certain brand of fizzy drink, so companies produce it. They don’t get penalized because those drinks rot people’s teeth and their insides and make them obese and curtail their life expectancy. Ok, I’m getting a little off track, but you see the comparison?
Google have a very sophisticated system that knows about pretty much every published site on the world wide web. They know who is buying links to get to the top.
Well hammer those guys! They are the problem because they are the ones trying to game the system by getting high placement in the search index, which is exactly what Google are trying, rightly to stamp out.
They are the sites that will make their owners a lot of money by artificially getting to the top of their niches. So hit them where it hurts - in the pocket!
The little guys writing reviews and including a link are not trying to game the system to boost their own placement in the SERPs because they are only low PR blogs to begin with. They shouldn’t be punished by taking away their small source of income directly because it is not fair!
And didn’t I mention I cannot bear unfairness.
I’m sure every disabled blogger who has been or is about to be slapped down because they make enough money to eat by writing some paid reviews will be happy that Google are stomping on them in order to get the bad guys.
If anyone thinks that the saying “Life is unfair” applies here, they need their head examining. Life is only unfair when someone who wields a lot of power makes it that way, when they don’t actually have to. Google don’t have to make life unfair. They have the power and the technology to make life very fair. I hope they see reason.
