I am not one of those people who worships at the altar of Google. Their green bar of power has not had any impact on my life before now. Unfortunately I am forced to kneel before the mighty G and ask for forgiveness.
You see, on one of my blogs I sold text link advertising. My DSLR Photography Blog had a PR of 6 so I thought I would make some cash off the fact. Google doesn’t like that. Messes with their heads. You can guess what happened next …
So Google did what Google does. What Google giveth they can take away. Bye bye green pixels. Of course the idea is if they devalue your commodity then you will likely stop selling it. Good plan.
Strange thing though, my text link customers did not go away. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it Mr Cutts!
If their downgrade of green didn’t impact my bottom line, why am I doing the mea culpa shuffle? It turns out I have had another offer to buy the site, but at a much lower price than when it was PR6. This customer is not bothered at all about PageRank, but they are concerned that this drop is a sign of a hand penalty.
It’s the whiff that I might have been flagged that has reduced the asking price. My traffic and subscribers are up but no buyer will take the risk that Google is going to handjob you out of the search results at any moment.
This leaves me cap in hand, calling for forgiveness, asking for mercy, for something that wasn’t a sin in the first place.
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Timely enough for commenting on this post, this week I was called by clients who received a google email saying they were blacklisted for at least 30 days because they had too many keywords on their pages.
While it is true there were many, any closer look would reveal that they were legit. Not a good design option, but nothing dishonest either.
I’m starting to worry about google’s influence on the democratic nature of the web
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I was running text link ads at two of my sites and was then banned from using Google Adsense on those sites.
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I was spanked from a PR5 to a ZERO. Despite months of “good behavior,” will my blog ever recover? Or is this blacklist a lifelong punishment?
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Have been in your shoes already :(
I learned it the hard way that seeling links or ads should be for traffic concern only…
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Same boat here. I was a pr 6, now have a 0. :(
I have removed the text link ads, and will only use the almighty google ads, and whatever banner ads I have in the queue. But will I ever see a pagerank increase again?
Oh well, at least I’m mostly doing it for the fun, and not the profit so it doesn’t effect me as much as it has other people I am sure.
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Excellent post.
Funny too.
Yeah, I’ve been slapped and penalized by Google and recovered as well.
Some of my sites lost PR, a few are back to 4 and 3s.
One still sits at zero.
We’ll see when the Big G blesses me with that PR7 someday.
And I ain’t talkin’ about Google
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Hi Chris. How about telling the potential buyer that once they bought it from you, they can remove the link ads and then request for a reconsideration/reinclusion?
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Chris, I had one blog up to PR4 and the rest were from PR 1 to PR3. Now, they’re all at 0. I’m tired of G telling bloggers what makes good content or a quality blog. It’s insane that anyone even pays attention to that particular ranking system anymore.
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I’ve been rather shocked nobody has taken to suing Google yet. I’ve seen a PR6 drop to PR3, two PR4′s drop to PR0. All this during the time the FTC saw no problem with Google’s DoubleClick acquisition.
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I had a couple of sites stripped of PageRank, presumably because I am selling Text-Link-Ads space on them. My traffic was not affected, and I think I only lost one or two link buyers.
Frankly, I’m baffled as to why Google would have a problem with this. I only sell text links to websites that are completely related to my content. Why should we be penalized for selling advertising? After all, Google is built on advertising dollars, and they created the culture of link buying to begin with.
I’m not taking down advertising space just because Google suggests I should by stripping my sites of PageRank. As long as traffic remains steady, I’ll just ignore that little meaningless green bar. Smart advertisers also know that PageRank is not particularly important.
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SEOMoz has a good post from today on this topic as well, from the buyers’ side of the issue: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/i-dont-buy-links
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It strikes me that getting a website appraisal before and after the google gestapo handjob would be a good way of determining an amount for damages caused by Google.
:)
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Thanks for the comments everyone. Unfortunately if I am going to auction the blog I need to make sure it looks 100% clean, nobody will take my word for it, that means having green pixels. The offers that have been made are only speculative (until a contract is drawn up or the money is in the bank it’s not a done deal, right?) so that means seeing what interest there will be. TLA to their credit have been very helpful.
Once TLA delete my account I will head over to Google webmaster tools and request they take another look at my site. Should get my green back as I never did paid posts, just sold some links in the sidebar.
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Does this mean we will need to turn off dofollow, as well? Do they penalize us for that too?
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I hope they don’t penalize for do-follow but you never know with the big-G
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Google = Monopoly = Bad for the internet!
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I have been reading about the PR penalizing since quite some time. Who Is google to command on how I want to stream my Income , by using their Adsense or selling links on my sites.
But I am afraid these penalizing does not effect ORganic Search Rankings.
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You sure told them! LOL. Especially when you said, “Strange thing though, my text link customers did not go away. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it Mr Cutts!” – I have not had this happen yet, though I am with the same sentiment. They don’t want anyone to make a decent living any more. Once would think that they would have some consideration for the smaller companies (in competitive regions & terms – like Los Angeles Limousine) that really need the organic seo because they cannot afford to pay those lousy PPC rates their up to. Some one needs to tell them that even Bill Gates changed his evil ways and went philanthropist – do you think that Google had something to do with that, too? :)
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This is so great. I always find such interesting stuff when I stumble onto this site again and again! .I’m going to be sharing this. Facebook here we come!