Google penalised many sites for selling paid text links in October 2007. Their belief was that such text links interfered with their search engine, but it is possible that they had other motives (see AdSense, one of their main sources of income). The decision to penalise these sites was still extraordinary; if Google could detect these links, could Google not just have ignored these links?

Google claimed paid text links damaged the reliability of results to the searcher, and it is easily argued that they do. What Google fail to realise is through making an example of websites, they are making their results less useful.

Is it not ridiculous that in a search for ‘Text Link Ads’, the first result is not the very popular site of the same name but instead a post about Google penalising the site? TLA in fact only appear on the fifth page of results; which is stupid when I expect many users searching for ‘Text Link Ads’ will be primarily looking for that site.

Another example is Everyclick, the search engine which raises money for charity. A search for Everyclick fails to bring the search engine up until the seventh page. Even on the sevent, the result is not to their homepage. As it so happens, my review of Everyclick is actually on the second page.

That is what is completely stupid; reviews of the website, and press releases involving it, rank higher than the website itself. Is that good for the user? No. It’s not just me who finds this a bit odd; Will Critchlow did an entire post on the matter last year.

Will speculated that ‘the main problem is that they are being penalised by Google at the moment for duplicate content problems. They have gone out… got mentioned on a load of powerful charity domains. The problem from Google’s point of view is that these pages look very much like… lightly rehashed press release content’. So Google penalised a useful site on the sole basis of the type of marketing they utilised.

Google must stop penalising advertising. They must stop penalising both the advertiser and publisher. If Google wants to ‘beat’ such forms of advertising, the way in which to do it is not to destroy their index but to simply teach their bots to ignore such advertisements.

‘Google controls the Internet’ might sound paranoid, but they do. Whilst they don’t exactly have editorial control over websites, they can force websites into entirely changing their revenue model.

A large percentage of my income used to be generated from text link ads, but I can no longer generate money in this way. Why, you ask? Google saw it fit to reduce the PageRank of this blog as a penalty, which meant I no longer got the visitors and the status to sell these adverts.

Google claims it made their search engine less usable, and whilst this may be true to a degree, they have made the whole internet become less usable as webmasters must now turn to more intrusive traditional adverts, such as advertising banners or interstitials.

I have another reason, besides usability, why Google may have seen it fit to ban text links. As text links became increasingly popular, more webmasters turned their backs on intrusive, and not as profitable, Google AdSense advertisements. This will have naturally reduced Google’s profit. Perhaps Google realised the only way to get people back on AdSense was through penalising text links, from which they don’t profit.

So, I turn away from text links. What do Google do? They stop the advertising programme which was most profitable for me, Google Referrals, and don’t let me join their new affiliate programme. I used to use ‘Firefox with Google’ advertisements, but Google are obviously now unwilling to foot the bill for Firefox users, especially following the release of Chrome. I doubt I can even make $100/month from AdSense now.

Thanks to Google, advertising online is becoming harder and harder. If advertising is harder to obtain, there’ll be less content as webmasters/bloggers will have less motivation to create content.

I understand Google wants to maintain the quality of their search engine, but I do wonder if there’s a line to draw regarding where Google’s influence should stop. Whilst I realise I don’t have to comply with Google’s ToS, in reality I do or I’d lose the vast majority of my visitors.

Perhaps it’s time for a serious competitor to Google. All giants fall, eventually.