Google has met it’s match, and it’s us. It better join us and help us sell better links or keep quiet.

So there was no advertising done before Google? Advertising links always existed and they were paid for in those days too.

I don’t think Google can be trusted to get it right. They’re not evil but neither is their method sophisticated enough for naive confidence.

Good to see that Google is “perfectly fine with people buying and selling links”. That makes sense. I can understand that they like some help through the nofollow because it simply isn’t that easy to detect the intention of a link. (just for PR or for the visitor.) Very happy to see that the idea of “use nofollow or else….” is not correct. But that that idea had came up is understandable in an age of “either with us or against us”… ;)

Serious publishers will never sell advertising to whoever. A normal website editor won’t simply put whatever in their site, also, or more likely, especially when it comes down to advertisers. You can’t have your audience leave you because of who you link to. I would even go so far that many visitors would rather leave because of who you allow to advertise in your site, than a link in a page that simply says that the site linked to is bad.

This whole thing will pass over,. Matt can sleep normally again,. :)

A good point, is advice ppl that if they link to a site that is someway flagged as web spammer, they will be penalized too. There must be responsability in the linking act.

I deserve to be compensated for the benefit that my advertising client gets for the traffic that I send over. I PAY to get these visitors to my site in the first place (via PPC, advertising, or long hours spent on content creation, PR and promotion).

Is there something wrong with advertisers wanting to earn better rankings from paid links? Google certainly benefits from this business model, why shouldn’t advertisers?

Oh, I could go on and on…. but I’m starting to feel a bit irritated with the premise of Google’s thinking and that’s my signal to shut up. :)

The things is that paid or not paid has nothing to do with vouching for or not. The two do not necessarily conflict each other. I link to what I like and sometimes to what I hate (knowing a thing or two about SEO makes me nofollow them), if I get compensated be it via revenue share, PPC, CPM or flat $ amount is even better.

I can write about what I love and share my experiences with others and get paid while doing so and are able to pay my landlord who gives about Ranking algo’s as much as the color of the monthly lease check he gets.

Again, this is rubbish. Is it about the vote or is it about money? It’s about money! Stock the BS and just admit it and get over it.

It’s not the first example of Google bending their own set rules and it will not be the last time either. Its not the nice and cute Google from 2000 anymore, it’s a several hundred billion dollars big corporate behemoth.