Dear Google,
Recently you’ve been doing some strange stuff and seem to have forgotten how to communicate and quite frankly it’s getting me worried.
I really don’t care about PageRank updates or downgrades but what gets me scared is when you make these changes without telling people whats going on. Every webmaster that had a PR reduction is logging on to their stats and checking rankings every 10 minutes to see if a ranking penalty is about to hit them.
Reputable bloggers that were nice enough to take your helpful advice about using nofollow and not selling links are now scratching their heads wondering what they did wrong and nobody seems to have the answer.
People are sat at their computer screens having never sold a link in their lives wondering whether their sites will get caught up in some kind of penalty. Obviously we know that they won’t because they follow the guidelines but the point is that you make people like me scared even though we’ve done nothing wrong.
What kind of company generates a climate of fear amongst people it doesn’t even have a financial relationship with?
What happened to your promise of better communication?
A few years ago you were just a search engine. Now you have a direct influence over peoples lives and paychecks and that requires a whole new level of social responsibility, now is the time to take that responsibility.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Without doubt the best post I’ve seen from this blog! And I totally agree with you, it’s time for Google to take some responsibility! Their not just “another search engine” anymore.
If you take it from Google’s perspective I think they are doing a good job in creating a fear and uncertainty. If I were Google I would do exactly the same with Pagerank values. Suddenly, all the webmaster community lacks a proper measurement of link value and that’s exactly want Google wants. On the other hand, its just a matter of time when webmasters or competition pick s up on that and create their own measurement of link value. So to sum up, I think short term its a good move and it may give Google more time to figure out next strategy how to combat paid links.
Live by Google, die by Google. Like it or not, Google controls the Internet.
the best post I have seen on the Google downgrade topic
Forcer, you are wrong…google owns the WORLD
No PR changes for my main sites, a few jumps from pr0 to pr3 for my other sites however. I think by people being kept in the dark about what means value now in the world of pagerank, google can eliminate people trying to sell quality to simply add to their pagerank score.
Nice job google =)
I couldn’t agree less. After googling about this topic, I found your site and I thought of sharing my similar thought as yours. Basically, Being a monopoly, it’s aint good for everyone.
Well said!
But Google isn’t going to change. We need to find or create alternatives, so that we aren’t so vulnerable to the corporate vampires.
Never before in history have so many been gathered in one space, at one time, as there are on the Internet today. We have the ability to speak in one strong voice.
We don’t have Googles assets, but they don’t have our flexibility, our maneuverability, our speed or our numbers. Corporations are slow and cumbersome.
Figuring out how to harness our strengths within this medium (the Internet) is one answer to this, and any number of other conundrums we face in our society today.
Sorry, but Google isn’t there to make your CEO tactics work, they’re not there to make you rich, they are not business partners of you, they are there to find the best results for a searchstring. The Google search algorithm doesn’t care about some “guidelines” you’re basing your business on and hey, there shouldn’t be any of those. Google would work best at the exact moment when CEO people can’t find anymore tactics for high pageranks, at the exact moment when only the sites with the best content or the perfect match to the searchterm show up on the first searchresults. Yeah, CEO people would need to find a new job, but again, Google is not your business partner, they are there for the people that search the web. Telling people whats going on doesn’t help Google at all, it just helps CEO people and lets them place litle Google bombs for money, why exactly should they do that? It’s not at all in Google’s interest.
if it makes you feel better, i thumbed up the page as i stumbled?
After days of blogs going berko over the PR drop and speculation going rampant, wouldn’t it be nice if Google took the mystery out of everything so [people could focus on what is really important? If the wider community starts seeing Google’s decisions as arbitrary or random, faith in the existing system is damaged and that has consequences for all internet users.
Either you read my article http://sphinn.com/story/11456 or you read my mind!
Anyone who bases their internet marketing solely upon “pagerank” is a fool. There are plenty of sites out there getting plenty of traffic for their niche with low PR or no PR at all. Webmasters should concern themselves more with posting relevant unique content than with optimizing their site for some arbitrary and sometimes irrelevant ranking.
Does Google realize that the lives of ordinary workers are dependent on the business’ rankings?
If my business dropped out of the top ten or first page, it would cost many people their jobs, lead to other problems like family issues, mortgage payments, etc.
I hope Google understands the HUGE responsibility their company has for the not just the ordinary business, but the employees that would suffer as well if google blacklisted a website.
Am I to understand that there are SEO experts who believe that Google gives preference to those companies that use pay-per-click or adsense? Obviously the website appears in the sidebar listings for adsense, but do they actually penalize sites that don’t pay for adsense pay-per-click advertising?
Living in fear is no way to live!!!!
Any advice?
Find me on Twitter
@Will, whether you use Adsense or not has no effect on your search rankings.
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