"Paid blog posts isn't the true reason they got penalized. Anything that competed with Google's Adsense got them penalized. It comes down to the fact that Google owns that ranking system and is now using it to leverage their own products." source
I'd been reading for years about how competitive the wild frontier of the Internet was but I never paid close attention to exactly how wild it was before plunging into the world of "getting paid to write about about the things I love."
Oh sure, I knew on a superficial level about page visits to Cyn City, about the difference between a "unique" hit (person browsing and "landing" on my site's page) and about how that same person having been counted for landing on my page, isn't counted for returning to my page on that date. She could come back a dozen times that day but in the world of "link juice" she was here but once. Hence the differentiation between hits or "pageviews" and "unique pageviews." If you are lost that's okay because I'm not delving much further. One could teach courses on this and related topics. Not kidding.
So when the (less) Great (than we thought) Google PageRank Smackdown happened late last year I literally did not know what hit me. Those that know the business however, knew to keep their finger on the the pulse of The Man, Matt Cutts, who made the decision that resulted in me reacting thusly: Google Love Gone Bad (Part III). His blog is the Google Unofficial blog,
Catching up, as I have invested embarrassingly long hours doing, has helped me somewhat in understanding what went down and why. But more than reading on my own, the guidance of others whom I'm not going to name/link to until I'm sure that my linking to them won't hurt them if they still retain a visible PageRank and especially a kind-hearted soul with the most awesome work title ever, Senior VP & Chief Futurist (for a tech company that you would recognize).
Said kind-hearted soul has now released verifiable information that "the claims that (Cyn City is) unable to pass link juice have been definitively proven false."
In short, the PageRank of ZERO that Google has forever* assigned this blog is in fact cosmetic only--but there's no way I can claim to have a higher rank as I can't prove it.
*The only way to get my PageRank "back" is to go to GOOG on bended knee, admit my wrongdoing, and delete all links that go somewhere someone can potentially profit. It does not matter if I got paid for the link or not. GOOG believes ALL the links emanating from Cyn City are "inorganic" and links such as those will come up via Google's own page ranking system and that, in GOOG's opinion is unnatural and cheating.
It's completely okay however, because GOOG makes the rules. Yes, Google's AdSense advertising pollutes the Internet everywhere you go and worse, when you do a search, Google places it's paid advertisements on the top of the search with such small disclosure that a non-savvy searcher could easily mistake the Google advertising for an "organic" search result.
Example: I typed "travel site." These are the Google results:
Google's official motto is "Do No Evil" and it is an excellent choice for a motto. After all, if you've lowered the bar so much that you will only Not Do Evil things then you've got lots of room to do say, Really Not Nice things or even Very Bad things. As long as they are not EVIL per se, all in Googleland is good.
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