March 3, 2009

This whole conversation drives me crazy! Like I commented on his blog, I have a unofficial band website and this weekend I will be starting a competition... A week a go I had the idea of getting the merchandise free from an official distributor of the bands clothing. There were several distributors that wanted to bite my arm off straight away. Naturally, I'd link to them as a 'thank you' for supplying to merchandise for free, so I do not want to put a nofollow on as technically, they are not paying for me to post, I was going to anyway.

The lines are still way too unclear for me! Besides, in the fan community - there are so many bloggers out there who have no idea what, why or when to use nofollow - this is because anyone can blog - tech savvy or not.

I love Google's decision. The real value of the web comes from real and honest content. Paid content is a distortion of truth and one day we no longer may find any original trustworthy blog articles or content pages because all are published for $ paid by the industry making the biggest $ profit out of it and forwarding a tiny share to bloggers.

There a billions of topics to publish unique unfiltered / unbiased content and there are similar numbers of daily problems technical or human nature to engage and public solutions to earn money in a honest way without being bribed by wallstreet and marketing industries.

paid blogging is for bloggers who lost their own God given creativity - the web is intended to be unique and unbiased - from people to people bypassing all authorities, censorship and industrial interests - for the sake and wellbeing of all society.

I don´t know, but as I see, Google techs are becaming to much crazy about what we do or not at Internet... Google is a legitime business, so as my... a Paid article, could be a great article... as I see, all non personal article, I mean I wrote it by my self are paid... so... news papers, magazines etc... most of then are paid... so what Google will think about?

@Ruben

It's not about the article content, it about the link(s) embedded in the content.

You know, this is absolutely crazy... What gives Google the right to determine what content they think is paid and what isn't.

Look at the first comment here posted by "himynameis john" - he has a band, fans are going to blog about the band and they aren't being paid to do it. Yet, Google appears as if it is going to penalize the band's website because these could be potential paid bloggers.

Google has always said that if you have a site/product/service that is worth anything, people will naturally link to it but people don't link to it from their website, they do it from within blogs, twitter, facebook, delicious, etc. and now Google is saying that these could be paid bloggers and they are going to penalize the site these links are being redirect to?

What Gives Them The Right??

Matt -

Since Google is so heavily censoring our link popularity efforts, you need to step up and tell us exactly what Google considers a viable link that will not get us penalized.

Ruben has a point, what is the difference between newspapers and bloggers? About half of the news you watch on tv and read online (especially the featured ones) are paid by advertisers. How is this any different from bloggers advertising for some products or companies online? Its just one of those things that has a double standard.

We are still in the pioneer days of the internet. As we all know the industry so to speak is only 15 years old, very young in any terms.
The "tweaking" will go on for some time. While there has to be some rules and Google being the monolith by sheer size feels it has the right to govern the progress, it seems a pity that it does not simply let the cream rise to the top.
But also having said that it would also be a pity to see big business buy its way to the top. This is the first time "all" have had the chance starting on even footing.

"Natural" quality in the end will win and I guess in a way this is what Google is trying to achieve.
Posts and links by merit not manipulation.

This is such a thorny issue. I do post paid reviews BUT only if I honestly believe what I am writing. A gal has to eat, but I try to be responsible and true to my readers. I think bloggers need to be held responsible for their content, but how is Google going to create rules for such a vague issue? And how to enforce them? With reciprocal blog promotions, blog tours and blog marketing being used more and more, how do you define a 'paid for post'?

One easy way to fix all this and end this debate is to change the algorithm to first consider for relevancy (title tag) and possible H-tags and then for position solely by page content.

No more popularity polls since it is so subject to vast variances.

I know I grossly simplified it, but dang, what better way to control than to eliminate.

I also wonder how will Google determine if a link was paid?

it's crazy to put the no follow tags on the blog posts, since many of them contain really good arguments. I would instead improve the manual evaluation of each post if the blog is really an online authority.

This conversation is making me laugh a little. Who gives Google the right you ask? It's their engine! They ca rank sites ANY way they want to. Also, does it occur to people that Google owes you NOTHING. If you want to be listed in Google's engine, play by their rules. If you don't, don't be surprised when you don't rank well. Organic traffic is free last time I checked. And if you think your content is so important that Google can't live without it, feel free to block Googlebot from your site. They won't lose any sleep I promise. I don't mean to rant but after a while when you start reading post after post on the Internet where people say "What gives Google the right to do this, who do they think they are?", you have to add a little common sense into the equation. Google doesn't owe you anything for the free traffic they GIVE you. If you like it, take yourself out of the engine. It requires one line of code.

Can you tell me how punish spam link