Stop Being a Google Slave

Exploring a few blogs today, I’m seeing a reoccurring theme that has to do with Google’s recent PageRank update. Google, it seems, is being aggressive in its war against paid link ads and devaluing websites who sell them.

PageRank is a sort of meter that Google uses to signify how relevant or trustworthy the content is on a particular web page/website. The theory that most website owners and web marketers work with is that when people use a search engine to look for information about a subject that they will not look past the first two pages of results. Therefore it is best to be ranked within the first one to two pages of the results. Google’s PageRank supposedly tells a website owner where their site/page ranks on the first page of results. So if your site/page rank is a 3, that means it will be listed third on the page starting from the bottom.

It is my opinion that PageRank is nothing more than a marketing ploy gone wrong. Google makes its money by selling advertising space on its search engine and through it’s Adsense program. To get people using both, it introduced PageRank which first tapped into people’s innate need to feel superior to others (otherwise known as pride, the deadliest of deadly sins) and then into their greed as people began making millions of dollars via the Adsense program.

The ploy worked and Google dominated the search engine market but then things began to go wrong when people realized that Google’s PageRank algorithm was based on how many websites linked to their page/site and that they could increase their PageRank simply by increasing the number of websites linking to their site/page. And so the paid link industry was born.

Google claims that paid links distorts the search results in its search engine by making a site seem more popular than it really is. They don’t seem to realize that they are the cause of this problem. By giving links more importance than they really should have, they have created the situation they now find themselves in with people buying links in order to increase their PageRank and rake in more traffic and money.

In an effort to stuff the marketing genie back into the bottle, Google has begun to devalue the PageRank of sites that use the services of the paid link company Text Link Ads as this seems to be the only way they are able to detect what links on a page have been paid for. And of course the internet has their panties in a bunch about it because many have made Google their god. They select web templates, write content and market their sites only for Google’s benefit and are now realizing what it means to be, excuse my net speak, pwned by them.

What website owners need to realize is that one, when it comes to self made gods, there is no appeasing them. Today it’s paid links. Tommorow, there will be a ban on all other advertising except Adsense. The day after that it will be approved content only. All gods want to remake the world in their image and without opposition Google will do just that to the internet.

Secondly, the internet has evolved since Google hit the scene. Not only are there other search engines that are just as good if not better but the focus has now turned to social networking. Just as you would not place your retirement savings into one account; you should not depend on one source for your website’s traffic. You should expand your marketing efforts to include other search engines and the new ways people are finding content on the web.

One thing Google did right was prove how important it is to think holistically when it comes to website marketing. Stop being Google’s slave and evolve to a higher level of thinking. Failing to do so can and will cause your internet business to die.