In 1998 when Google entered the mainstream it was a breath of fresh air, an ingenuous solution to an unimpressive search engine industry. As an early adopter I caught on and made sure everyone I knew was abandoning Yahoo in favor of the far superior Google product. To this day I continue to use Google services from Analytics, to Gmail to Google Maps, and more; Why? because they are superior in every way to the competition. Google has figured out ways to stay two steps ahead of everyone through unparalleled ingenuity in every avenue…..until now.

AdSense – Google’s sinking ship?

Virtually unchanged since revolutionizing Internet advertising when it launched in 2003, AdSense revenues are sharply declining for Google and webmasters. Now if history holds true you’d expect Google innovation to shine through to get things back on track; not this time. In alternative course of action Google has decided to punish webmasters who utilize competing advertising services. If you decide to use paid links, text link ads or paid blog reviews be prepared to accept a page rank penalty and decline in search engine traffic from Google.
Will video ads succeed? potentially, but look how well the radio and print experiments turned out.

Bring it on?

Now it’s time to see what you are made of. Can you afford to ignore Google’s penalties and do your own thing? At WhyDoWork that is the route we have chosen. We continue to accept text link ads because that revenue is substantially more than AdSense despite incurring PageRank cuts and decreases in referrals from Google. We aren’t happy to be fighting Google - I miss being friends! This is especially the case with the lingering fear we have of suffering the same fate as John Chow. His site doesn’t even rank for the terms ‘John Chow’ in Google primarily because of penalties for using unsanctioned advertising means. Now John had already managed to amass 15,000 blog subscribers and is surviving on his own, but not every site can be sustainable without help from the big G.

Another strong advocate against the actions of Google is Andy Beard, who supports the idea that if you create great content, its Google’s job to find and index it, and not (as he says) “bend over” and accept a penalty for not using nofollow. :)

And the Champion in the Blue, Red, Yellow, Blue, Green, and Red corner….


The face of Google search engine today, Matt Cutts has discussed why these sites should be penalized. To do this, he attempts to villanize the practice of paid links through a fictional example where by the scapegoat (paid blog reviews) has corrupted the integrity of brain tumor information on the web. Please don’t believe this example to be true. What is actually happening is webmasters are now more likely to put ‘no_follow’ on non-paid links in fear of loosing page rank, whether they continue to accept paid links or not.


Matt Cutts says:
“It should be clear from Google’s stance on paid text links, but if you are blogging and being paid by services like Pay Per Post, ReviewMe, or SponsoredReviews, links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. The rel=”nofollow” attribute is one way, but there are numerous other ways to do paid links that won’t affect search engines, e.g. doing an internal redirect through a url that is forbidden from crawling by robots.txt.”

Now anyone familiar with any of the above services knows that adding a nofollow tag or any or the other above methods to sites paying to advertise with you will result in immediate termination of your agreement. So reading between the lines, you either continue using AdSense along with traditional affiliate services or get ready to step into the ring with Google.

And the Challenger?

I don’t believe in this nofollow business. Google claims they are trying to prevent webmasters from passing it along, but why? PageRank is supposed to equal the popularity and importance of a website. If a site has a high PageRank it means it is successful, and as such it deserves the right to sell advertising on it and for a premium. Popular sites sell advertising to make money, and advertisers pay money to become popular; that is the whole engine behind the marketing industry. If in addition to traffic and notoriety, PageRank is transferred in the advertising exchange, so be it. Advertising = paid popularity, deal with it!

Google claims a solution is to put a nofollow tag on your paid outbound links but what does that even mean anymore. So should every link I give out contain nofollow? will that mend this relationship? Google is creating a black-market for standard ‘a href=’ links. What MBA egghead is coming up with this? Sites with nofollow outbound links are now given higher relevance in the SERPS because proper Google approved web development involves hording your pagerank. This is ridiculous, and Google can push webmasters around all day but I refuse to participate in the madness, even though I’ve seen our main page PageRank slide from a 7 to a 4.

And the Winner is….You (after being beaten to a pulp)

In the end what is happening is Google is penalizing high quality websites (like ours) (yes I am saying this website is high quality in an industry ridden with scams) (do a search for “work at home” and see what you get), giving prominence to less relevant results in their SERPS for unjustified reasons. If they continue these shoddy tactics in a sad effort to sustain AdSense revenue I predict continued degradation of search results and subsequently a loss to their crown as the search engine champion. Webmasters will gain from reduction in their reliance of Google traffic, its just unclear as to when that will ever be. I know Matt is a big Mahalo supporter. Perhaps human intervention is what it will take to get quality results once a shift in the online advertising industry takes place? I’m not sure how the search industry will evolve over the coming years, but I’m pretty sure that penalizing great content just because of a particular advertising medium probably isn’t the answer.

This rather fiery post was guest blogged by Joe Ross, one of the founders of the site and clear advocate of no nofollow :)

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