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If you think Google does it out of purely noble intention, giving everyone an equal chance to rank high, regarding the capital you invested in buying links — you are wrong. Google does not really care weather you pay or not, however, they care WHO you pay to. Ideally, pay them, and advertise via Adwords.

Let’s see how it started the past months

First Matt Cutts writes openly in his blog, calling webmasters to report paid links. Following that, we see some ranking collapse, best and most well known example is John Chow not only not ranking for the term “make money online”, but it looks like Google kicked him out even for the term “John Chow“. Same happens to Text Link Ads, that no longer rank anywhere for “text link ads” and many other sad examples.

PageRank Apocalypse

The hysteria continues when all the top bloggers and top ranking sharks lost -1, and even -2 of their toolbar candy, and that is, with PR Q3 not even being finalized. Unofficially, Google confirms the penalty being rolled out and case by case websites and advertisers get kicked out of top ranking as well as now pay for their criminal past of buying link with live, green, vivid PR.

Google’s message to webmasters: Don’t sell PageRank, your site will lose ranking.

Google message to advertisers: Don’t buy PageRank, your site will lose ranking.

…And, the aftermath?

Naturally, advertisers are afraid to buy links via semi-banned and penalized Text Link Ads. They afraid to do it in some other networks as well for same reason. Naturally webmasters removed the “buy links here” text, they don’t offer it openly in forums anymore and as a result, link sales slowed down. Webmasters report that their  Text Link Ads revenue collapsed, with all the advertisers pulling back. But, who did win here? Of course Google. If you want to make sure you advertise and 100% comply with Google’s strict ranking policy, you can advertise via Google Adsense. This brings traffic, not links (since the script is Java-based, however, if you need to keep promoting, you will take this option.

Links sales revenue collapsed, Adsense revenue raised. Many webmasters had seen the obvious increase in Adsense revenue, and no wonder. Bottom line, it all came down to monopolizing the whole buy-and-sell-and-publish-links and search-and-rank industry.

However, if Google takes it case by case, looks like there is still plenty of work to do…

Tags: Adsense

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