Here’s some more honest information that may or may not interest you: I got wind of this from a post in Grizzly’s blog How to Make Money Online for Beginners.

Following the crackdown on link selling and paid review writing blogs by Google, it appears they are not intent on stopping there with their single-minded all-out assault on the acquisition of links by any means other than the natural way.

By that I mean if you think a website is really helpful to you and contains lots of relevant information to your search, it would be natural for you to provide a link to it on your own site so that others could find it and make use of it too. That’s a naturally given link to a good site.

The opposite is giving a link to another site whether it’s good or just a page full of crappy ads just so that you can either obtain a reciprocal link, or get paid in some way for providing the link. This is what Google are quite rightly trying to stamp out so that the sites at the top of its list are relevant to the search term entered.

No arguments there.

But it is coming at a terrible price for small blog owners who are trying to raise the profile of their own blogs and make a few bob in the process. The argument has been raging for over a month now and there’s not a lot of point in adding any more fuel to the fire here.

What I’ve since learned has dampened the blogging spirit just a little more – that Google may well increase their slapping activities to include blogs that use the do-follow plug-in.

That would make sense as their primary goal is to stamp out ANY form of link acquisition that is not naturally generated and this would include obtaining back-links for posting comments in other people’s blogs that allow it.

For that reason, this blog has deactivated the do-follow plug-in until this matter is clarified.

It has been noted that Blogger (the free blogging host that is owned by Google) has removed the URL box from all it’s blogs comment boxes, so you are no longer able to enter your URL when posting a comment to a Blogger blog. That effectively sends out the message that Google will not tolerate anyone even giving away free links.

Where will it stop?

How will anyone be able to obtain links to their sites if no-one is allowed to give them without fear of losing their own page rank?

Will anyone who even links to one of his OWN sites be penalized if he doesn’t use nofollow?

Does that just mean that only the very top sites will ever get to the top of the search engine results pages because everyone else links to them?

Ok, it hasn’t come to that (yet) and let us hope it never does… but one thing still amazes me about the whole slapping thing.

How come the very recipients of these paid links still have their infernal page rank?

And one more thing to ponder.

PayPerPost are the paid review site most targeted by Google as it hammers it’s member bloggers blog’s page ranks down to zero. It must be hard work sifting through all those 100,000 or so blogs to find the ones with links that have earned their owner’s a few dollars.

You’d think they’d go after the easiest site of them all to find in order to slap their page rank down to zero to make an example, but they have not and this particular site’s page rank is still PR5.

Who am I talking about?

PayPerPost themselves!

Go figure!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

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