One of my sites is getting toasted, and I’m happy
I’ve got a bunch of article reprint sites and used to make several hundred from text link ads, back before Google went on a rampage about that. During Google’s rampage, a curious thing happened: this site, one of those reprint sites, and one other site got their visible PR zeroed out. I eventually took paid links off this one and the other one and requested PR back (and got it). But the reprint site, I left: people were still buying links even with the zero PR, and I was curious to see what would happen.
Now the site is suddenly losing its TLA advertisers. And none of its little reprint friends – which do have some PR – are raking in the money either. It may sound strange, but I’m finding this a relief. Because it’s such a temptation to build more of those sites so I have at least some money coming in while I wait for my other sites to take off – the sites I actually think have a future. If these sites aren’t doing so well anymore, the temptation is gone.
I still have to say this, though: we were all idiots to let Google push us around. That whole paid link thing was nothing but an attack on TLA, a competitor who was kicking ass. But we knew that – many of us talked about it. Where we were idiots was in letting that affect how we ran our sites. It’s very clear to me that my sites that got toasted were handpicked by a competitor – I could tell that by the sites they missed which were selling text links, never stopped selling them, and never lost a point of PR. So not only was the whole thing about Google trying to squash a competitor while pretending they had a more “do no evil” motive than that – it was also about us trying to squash each other.
And I’ll go on record right now saying I turned in one site for paid links. Not a site that had anything to do with affiliate marketing, but just this really nasty site full of trolls who attacked another site of mine. Did Google take even a nibble out of their PR7? Oh, lord, no. Interesting, isn’t it?
If I had the whole thing to do over again, I wouldn’t have blinked at Google’s game of chicken. They cannot purge sites from the index for having paid links, because that is the step that would put them over the line and in violation of US monopoly laws. They can reduce visible PR because PR was invented to sell AsWords and if folks are using it to sell other ad products, that’s folks’ problem. But if they exclude you from their directory for doing business with a competitor… that’s not okay by law, and one of Google’s competitors – probably Microsoft, who’s been on the wrong side of monopoly laws itself before – would secretly fund a “grass roots campaign” by a bunch of alleged nobodies and take it all the way to the DoJ.
(For anyone wondering, “Hey, I thought she had a rule against talking about Google!” – I should be more specific about that rule. I refuse to speculate about Google’s latest shenanigans like 90% of the other blogs in this niche do every time Google sneezes. That’s just free PR for them – they feed it to you, and you spit the links right up for them. I won’t do that. But I will occasionally talk generally about Google and how they affect my sites, and what I’ve learned about working for, around or against them. Because that’s something we all have to deal with. The shenanigans are best ignored.
Subscribe to 