Comments on: Google is an angry god

By: how to make money fast

how to make money fast — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 17:52:11 +0000

When a man gets angry he falls down.

By: iDonny

iDonny — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 20:37:29 +0000

In order for google to remain relevant, it must maintain independence from the so-called heavyweights and use it’s whim and strategic thinking of make sure search results are of good quality. Otherwise it will be falling into the trap of the old paradigm that we all dislike (the elite sites or minds determining what is worth public notice). I am sorry that you got punished for having money-making, but content irrelevant links on your site, but many of use that write content for the love of our trades (not to spread pagerank to others) did not get punished.

My golden rule is that SEO on purpose and just for the sake or SEO, or to master and exploit the google formula is the undoing of any SEO effort. As we all know, if you write useful content that makes sense to humans, and only link to things that will benefit your readers (not links to benefit your friends), your site will establish itself as useful to human beings (who are the ultimate consumers of your site anyway), regardless of what google, Lycos, Yahoo, or whatever the next search engine dictatorship might be.

Just to let you know, I lost my entire pagerank between August and November (I removed the www in my domain), but this did not affect the traffic… the results ranking actually continued to improve. I stay aware of the rules, but never bend to them just for ranking at the expense of good information.

By: Aral

Aral — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 11:18:34 +0000

Hi Lee,

Actually, the ads have allowed me to create SWX this year so I just can’t being myself to think ill of them. That said, I’m going to be launching a new initiative that should address your concerns, _and_ benefit some other Flashers.

By: Danny Sedor

Danny Sedor — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:59:48 +0000

Sadly, I too feel that Google has blatantly misused there powers in this instance. Advertising is advertising. It’s the same as Domino’ Pizza or Toyota advertising during the Super Bowl or the World Series…What does either company have to do with Baseball?? But saying that those ads are inappropriately placed is just foolish.
Advertisers want there ad placed in prominent place so it can BE SEEN. They pay for it to be displayed where it will be noticed.

By: LEE

LEE — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:33:45 +0000

Perhaps chiming in a bit harsher than Keith Peters & Tink, the textlinks are silly. Sure you can maybe make a few dimes with ads (irrelevent or not), but this is your professional blog, right? Your profession isn’t directly related to Golf, Auto Detailing, Home Loans, Calling Cards, Flower Delivery, Freezers, Office Supplies…..etc etc…

The proper thing to do is option d)

a) Add a ‘Promoters of Aral’ feature page
b) Post occasional promotional stories ‘Aral loves Nacho Cheese Doritas’
c) Continue mirking the waters of info-blogs with ads (with varying degrees of subtlety & relevancy)
d) Maintain an ad-free professional blog

Irrelevent, and unrequested ads are hurting the internet, for every ad shamelessly thrown on a blog, a virtual angel sheds a tear mate!

By: DannyT

DannyT — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 14:41:52 +0000

Hey Aral,

Ever heard of The Deck? Basically a group of high-volume traffic sites that charge a premium for a very picky advertising platform: “We won’t take an ad unless we have paid for and/or used the product or service.”

How about organising something similar for high-profile flash bloggers and sites? Anyone serious about reaching such a specific audience would (hopefully) be prepared to pay the required rates, will not be worried about pagerank as it’s not pagerank they’re after, it’s a targetted audience. No interferrance from the almighty G, then you guys get to focus on the projects that make our lives easier.

Just a fleeting idea I thought i’d share :P

Dan

By: Tink

Tink — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:05:24 +0000

“However, it will also end up hurting itself because it will deprive the search results of the relevant content from my site.”

You could see it that way, or you could interpret that your hurting yourself and the ability to find your content by having the ads mentioned previously. i.e. both you and google are making a decision here.

Just being devils advocate like keith ;)

By: Josh Walsh

Josh Walsh — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 23:06:33 +0000

Our PageRank dropped too. I’m not worried about it yet either. Our SERPS haven’t been affected and our traffic is unchanged. Accessible websites built with web standards, especially those with genuinely useful content, will tend to do better in the SERPS automatically.

By: Google Penalizes Paid Links : Designing Interactive

Google Penalizes Paid Links : Designing Interactive — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 23:02:22 +0000

[...] Aral Balkan discusses the impact it had on his blog on his recent post Google is an Angry God. His site dropped from a PR8 to a PR5 overnight. [...]

By: Saxon

Saxon — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 02:04:54 +0000

I’d almost say the Weblogs Inc. blogs deserved to be penalized for the practices they employ. In the body of all of their articles they link back just about once per article to their own internal search engine on some random word. I keep clicking links absentmindedly thinking I’ll go to somewhere relevant but I just wind up at their search results page. That, at least, is a blatant misuse of google’s page rank system and if they’re combatting this so much the better.