Stop Blowing Smoke Up Our Ass Google
Originally, I started to write this as a comment on the Matt Cutts Repsonds, Confirms Double Standards post over at the IZEA Blog. Given the length of my comments and the fact that I’m raising some additional issues, I felt it best to post here instead.
No offense is intended towards Matt Cutts personally in this post. Matt, I don’t know you personally, so I would not confront you personally. You just happen to be the voice of a company I take issue with right now. Please take my comments as such.
<begin rant>
If I link to anyone, I’m getting something in return for it. I’m either adding value which benefits my visitors then returns the benefit with return visitors. Consistent, highly targeted traffic is most certainly a commodity. Therefore, by definition, every link on every one of my sites earns revenue of one sort or another, whether it be cash or traffic, which eventually leads to $$$. I get something in return from every single link.
Matt, is Google going to penalize me again because I’m getting paid off in traffic for every link I make?
Seriously, PageRank is a broken metric. Let’s get real. How many quality backlinks a site has is a very poor metric for measuring its worth. I recently wrote a post that sent out 380+ trackbacks and got Shpunn and Stumbled. Was it a quality post, no, not really, but I got some quality followed backlinks from it. It took me less than 30 minutes to write that post.
That single post will most likely end up getting a PR2+ within a couple updates because 1) I wasn’t compensated with cash. 2) The content of the post centers on a relatively tight niche and the text is all relevant.
We’re talking about a low quality post here. Then entire post was a list of posts I’ve bookmarked. Sure, some people appreciated the backlink and exposure. Some people were exposed to posts they otherwise might not have known about. However, no unique information was given. It was simply a list of links to other articles with some descriptive text. Yet, I’ve published pages like this before or other sites and seen them rank well in SERPs and get a decent PR for a deep page.
Matt, would you care to explain why Google’s algorithm is broken to the point where a junk post like mine that can rank well and get PR while a high quality, editorial post, that happens to be paid, like what Andy wrote, gets hit with a PR penalty?
The issue here isn’t paid vs. editorial. Let’s cut the BS. All content has one payoff or another and nearly all of it leads to $$$ in the long run. The issue here is Google’s algorithm is broken and cannot differentiate between shit content and quality content. If it could, junk posts wouldn’t end up with good PR and SERPs. I see splogs on the 1st page of Google SERPs for competitive phrases on a regular basis.
Another Example: I recently sold a site that once had a page that was nothing more than RSS feeds from related sites. On that page, there were links to the originating sites and a short excerpt of their feed. This page was a subpage of the domain. Yet, this page got a PR5… For displaying RSS feeds that were aggregated on several hundred other sites. AND This page also helped the site rank #1 for a very competitive term in Google’s index. Scraped content. PR5. 1st place ranking. Junk content that added no value other than centralizing news feeds of related sites.
Sorry Matt. As a whole I respect you and the company you represent. However, I wont stand with my hands on my cheeks while someone tries to blow smoke up my ass.
Google needs to stop making webmasters report paid content with the misuse of a standard and instead should focus on writing an algorithm that does a better job of differentiating between quality content (paid or not) and crap content that happens to be relevant.
</end rant>
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Woohoo fight the power!
Seriously though, I agree with all the points raised here, over at Andy’s blog, and other advocaters of the “google is missing the mark” brigade.
The whole point of singling out paid links has been to try and use what is no more than an potential indicator of “poor quality” or “lack of worth” as the end result. An 11 year old could tell you that the two won’t automatically converge.
It’s akin to treating a symptom (compensation) instead of the actual problem (quality).
I’ve always said I appreciate that organising the quality of the web must be a very difficult task, but a search engine is there to make sense of it, and it shouldn’t require us as webmasters to do the job for them.
PS. the thing that sucks most is that soon we all start sounding like broken records, regardless of the validity of the arguments put forward. If Google choose to stand their ground, there is little anyone can do, although such actions are likely to lead to more competition arising (every cloud has a silver lining).
I totally agree. Search engines are a service to index and rank content. It is not their job to dictate who publishes what content where.
The thing that burns my ass is that, if I were running a multi-million dollar site that happened to earn Google some nice dosh, Google’s current activity suggests that it would turn a blind eye to “sponsored” links on my site.
To me, this is Google’s futile attempt to improve the quality of their index by treating the symptom with a band aid. Nevermind that spammy, low quality sites regularly show up on the first page of the index.
I suppose what annoys me is the fact that Google can’t admit the real problem lies with them. Well, that’s not completely true, because the moment they have to ask an external source to do something to aid with rankings, it’s an implicit concession that they are not up to the job.
Or maybe those conspiracy stories are true, and they just want to stifle the competition lol.
I heard some guys talking about this on webmasterradio.fm a few weeks ago and I have to agree. Why aren’t we allowed to sell links on OUR space? Google does not own our websites. Why not just penalize the links that are irrelevant like they usually are and just leave the rest alone?
Exactly. The issue is about relevancy and quality. Even in Google’s double standard, they are showing us that this is the case.
How many high profile, big name websites took a PR hit? How many of them get paid to write about a company or get paid for links?
Even focusing on the double standard argument could let google off the hook! Yes we want all websites to be treated equally, but it would also be extremely helpful if engines (Google in particular) stopped effectively saying: use nofollow, or be penalised.
The line of thinking makes absolutely no sense long term, so unless they have a better alternative in the pipeline coming soon, it’s a bit of a shambles isn’t it? Asking people to mark paid links, report each other, and after all of that, treat all paid links as bad – without looking into other (more important) factors.
I don’t see for one moment why that argument isn’t more widely accepted (the logic seems fairly sound); is everyone so accepting of Google that they assume those who reason otherwise must be wrong?
Great post, I completely agree. I don’t think google is gonna change their mind- I just hope they don’t de-index all of us in the end… loosing PR is bad enough, but not being in the index at all would be the death of a lot of us.
[...] Andy Beard – Google Dictating Nofollow for all Links from Compensated Content James Morris – Google Blowing Smoke up our Ass Ted Murphy – Matt Cutts Reponds, Confirms Double Standards Michael Gray – TechCrunch Scared of [...]
Hallo James
I really think its a great post you´ve written here. I have added your website to my favorite sites.
[...] This policy that has been well argued for months now, with a great commentary from Andy Beard, a venting from James Morris and speculation that Yahoo are happy with paid [...]
nice way to blow off some steam. wow!
I agree that google should start writing a new and better algorithm. Let bloggers control the spaces on their blogs. btw, I stumbled this post. Would like to share it to more people.
Thanks for the stumble!
Yeah, at the time I wrote this, I was pretty pissed. I’ve calmed down a bit, but I still don’t like Google’s PageRank model. I can respect the desire to have a qualitative measure, I just think their implementation sucks.
You raise some rather interesting questions here. I wonder: Have you ever had any kind of response from Matt? Or from other authorities at Google?
I'm not going to use nofollow. Period. When someone posts a comment they are dofollow'd because that link is earned by the comment. (I am vicious with spam comments … don't even try.)
Why would I review something (especially favorably) and not encourage the bots to add value to the linked object? Doh!
BTW, I followed a link to here from a mutual reader we have via the "Sez Who" plugin. It's nice … I've found several blogs that I've liked by following the links SezWho exposes.
Just a follow up on Thomas' Question… Did you get any kind of response from Google?
“Did you get any kind of response from Google?” – probably not?
Nice post, probably not going to change their mind. But I totaly agree with you!
Valid points. And yeah, sure, a minority of people blogs merely for the fun of it or for charity purposes. Whether or not someone is paid directly with cash – or in a less visible currency – shouldn’t matter, really. The quality of the copy and information should, however. Atleast that’s my 2 cents.
Hmm, I am not quite sure that I agree with you, but then again I don’t now a lot about the area.
I love the tag
hi JMorris,
cool article.
Interesting article. You have one or two interesting points there.
hi,
great article.
thanks a lot for sharing the information.
Want to know more about quality content and crab content. It has given me a good deal of information.
Great post – But I´m not sure I agree completely with you