Paid links to be completely devalued by Google, hit back!

They already know our friends and relatives through our gmail contact lists.

 

Just the ones who is google checkout to pay for paid links get "F"

As google know both ends of it.

 

As an alternative to retaliation, try using Google services as less as possible. For start with the search engine. Never "Google" things again. Since yesterday I began using the Yahoo search engine and guess what? It works. Relevant links and even an accurate backlink report. No PageRank updates, no backlink updates, what you see is what you get, all in realtime. Next I'll try to get rid of the Google Analytics code on my site and also try to use my Gmail account as less as possible.

Boycotting is effective if it starts with little things. I'm doing my share. Are you?

Best regards, George

 

So what exactly will happen to sites that have links that were sold?

Will they see a -30 penalty? Will those specific links just not count and therefore the only person losing out would be the buyer? Or will all links be made meaningless on that website?

 

The trouble with boycotts is that it takes a lot of people making some kind of sacrifice to make even a tiny difference, and human nature just doesn't work that way.

For example, in theory, we as webmasters have ultimate power over google. If all webmasters blocked googlebot from their site and demanded that their pages be removed from google's index, google would collapse more or less overnight - no pages in the index would mean unhappy users and loss of revenue.

But that would only work if everyone acted together. Since many of us get a huge percentage of our traffic from google, and make money from AdSense, how many of us would actually do that - or could afford to even consider it? Even if the idea gained momentum and lots of us did so, there would still be many others who would see it as an opportunity to take advantage of reduced competition - they would make money out of our efforts to teach google a lesson, we would lose money and google would carry on regardless.

It's a shame, because google's ever-increasing influence over us annoys me greatly, and I'd very much like to see them reduced in stature. I just don't have the faintest idea of how it could realistically be done.

Rob.

 

hahaha.. it makes sense. they were against paid links only..

 

If you remove the value of back links then the only value they have is traffic. What a concept. Just like it used to be.

Still though I think Google is making a bad call here. They would have been much better of just not even mentioning it, and slowly implementing it. Someone mentioned here they should kill of Matts blog. I totally agree.

 

They should just get rid of the term "page rank" or not release the information to the public

 

DESTROY THEM!!

 

Dir.yahoo.com links aren't penalized. How come? Aren't they paid links?

 

Good example, It's really very hard to distinguish paid from non-paid links

 

Only the strongest ones will survive, I think.

 

BOYCOTT GOOGLE!

I have. I've taken off AdSense on all my sites, switched to Yahoo search (which I'm discovering is actually quite good), installed AdBlocker to block Google's ads (no more clicks or even impressions means not a penny in Google's pocket), no more YouTube, no more Blogspot.com, I uninstalled the Google toolbar, and I've edited my hosts file to block anything and everything Google.

STOP SUPPORTING A COMPANY THAT IS ACTIVELY WORKING TO DESTROY YOUR REVENUE MODELS!

 

They are doing the right thing . In the long run, removing all directories, spam blogs, and sig links , will greatly improve SERPs.
Real sites, with real content, will no longer have to compete with sites that inflate their importance by manipulating incoming links
There is NOTHING wrong with advertising, and getting visitors. There is nothing wrong in improving your page hierarchy and intra-site linkage to make it more crawlable.
There IS a big problem in paying money to manipulate SERPs via fake importance. It's no different from meta keyword spamming in the pre-google days.

 

Yes, just like it used to be before Google came in with it's ideas about organic/natural link building and didn't think people would start selling PR7 links?

Any method they use to rank a website can and will be manipulated. And announcing an end to it, or that they will stop it, is bunk. They can't do it. In a way, it's the war on drugs. Link selling is popular because Google made it so, it's a black market type of thing. Good luck, people never learn.

 

Their ever increasing influence annoys me too.

I think you're on the right track with boycotting but it would take a large group of people to start it. Once everyone could see that a boycott was occurring, the rebellion would grow exponentially. Also, we may all lose hits from Google but all those people would have to switch to Yahoo or MSN and we would receive many more hits from them. The people searching would just go elsewhere.

Until something big starts happening, simply boycotting their services - search, analytics, gmail, etc. can at least be a small step in the right direction.

No need to boycott adsense just yet. Afterall, we don't want to lost revenue.

 

The founder of Wikipedia was on television just the other day speaking of his new project, I believe it was called Wikia or something like that. It is a search engine undergoing open source developement. Once developed it is intended to make high quality search site development as easy as downloading the script an installing on your server. I got the feeling he felt as though the search marketplace is highly monopolized...

 

I can't believe Google stock trades @ $483

How many peoples life savings will be ruined when this stock tanks ?

Look at this page : http://finance.yahoo.com/q/co?s=GOOG

Yahoo has the same gross margin as google but has 1/2 the revenue.

Yet the google stock trades @ 16x higher than the yahoo stock ($484 vs $28).

Here is something you can take to the bank : this stock will tank.

This stock is completely overpriced and should probably be trading around $50-$60 a share (still double yahoo).

There is no way I'd have google in my portfolio. It's not a matter of if but when you'll wake up to the bad news.

 

This is precisely what I've been doing the last month or so, and you know what. It works great. Life without Google was surprisingly easy. As an added step, I installed adblocker, so now Google won't even get a single ad impression from me. F*ck Google.