Good evening everyone,
    I will refer to today, as the Black Wednesday for Bloggers. Why? Google has started penalizing websites, mostly blogs, for putting up sponsored text links from their pages and posts. This is because a lot of cheating was going on, and the revolutionary Google Page Rank technology was being abused by websites.

    How PR works - Google Page Rank works on a system of voting. Imagine we have 2 pages, Page A and Page B. If Page A links to Page B, A gives a vote for B. The higher the number of votes, the higher your page rank. Now, PR is not just a factor based on the number of links. It also takes in to consideration the quality of such links. i.e. A link from a higher PR page causes your page PR to increase more than a link from a lower PR page. So if Page B gets a link from Yahoo!, it’ll have a higher PR than when it got a link from A. Thats the basic idea.

    What happened - Links are not easy to come by. Especially for slightly dodgy sites, like page names implying something, but having other content. Or for start up banks and mortage services. So what these guys did is, they paid websites, especially bloggers, who had the license to blabber about anything they wanted, to post links to these sites, either on their sidebars, or through reviews. Many get-paid-to-blog services, like PayPerPost, ReviewMe, and PayU2Blog, sprung up, and the advertisers made use of these services to get links from bloggers. These services essentially paid bloggers to post a review or a blog post about their clients, for a small commission. The links came in from all blogs - small and big, low PR and high PR, low traffic and high traffic. One of the nasty factors promoting this industry was Google PR. So these dodgy websites, which was supposed to have low PR because of negative factors, ended up with high PRs because of the link manipulation. Thus, Google’s search was effectively manipulated with money, and thus the search results were also manipulated.

    So, Google got panicky. A variable against their revolutionary and near perfect search system? No sirree!

    And they decided to go on the aggressive. Google decided to reduce the PR of websites and blogs, which they termed as link farms. Down went the PR of all blogs utilizing get-paid-to-blog services, and those blogs and sites which used direct text link services, like Text-Link-Ads.

    The bloggers have started feeling the pinch today. Thousands of bloggers are feeling the pinch, and are running helter skelter for answers. Duncan Riley, from TechCrunch, reports that even big blogs, like Engadget and Autoblog facing huge PR drops (Engadget went from PR 7 to PR5, and Autoblog from PR6 to PR4).

    Now these huge blogs wont feel the pinch too much, because they depend upon their huge established readership base, fan clubs, word of mouth marketing, credibility, feed readership, and community driven content networks (like Digg and Reddit) to sustain and develop their traffic and popularity. But smaller blogs, whose traffic is at least partially dominated by search engine traffic, mainly from Google, this will be a bit hit. BloggingIndia has not been hit so far, because we do not yet have paid links, but my other blog has felt the pinch.

    What will happen due to PR drops?

• Drop in traffic from Google, closely followed by drop in traffic from other search engines
• Drop in market value of the blog/website
• Drop in ad value. i.e. The amount given to the blogger for the displayed ad
• Essentially, therefore, a drop in traffic and monetary value of the blog/website

    Extracts from conversations in a get-paid-to-post service community -

• This is the most whack PR update ever. I’ve never seen ranks drop, and then drop AGAIN in a matter of 2 weeks?I found all of my blogs dropped again this morning. In 2 weeks, one blog went from a 5, to a 4, and then this morning is sitting at a 3. After being PR 4 for years.

• Mine went from 4’s to 2’s. Oh happy day…

• My PR5 blog is now a PR3. My PR4 blog went down last week to a PR3 and today to a PR2.

    Meanwhile, bloggers worldwide are going on a rampage against Google. The first I came across was by Beth, at AFrogToKiss. She has decided to stop using all Google services. She advices users to stop clicking Adsense ads, uninstall Google software like Google Earth, Google Desktop Search, Picasa, Google Toolbar and so on.

    From my part, I’ll say this, its our fault that we fell greedy to money and started putting up with such sponsors. We tampered with a system which Google thought was foolproof, which was bound to happen sometime anyway, and Google is plying for time, penalizing bloggers, while they try to develop a new foolproof alternative for PR, now that it has been proved that PR is biased. Yes, PR is very biased now. In their quest to penalize sites sporting sponsored links, they haven’t yet penalized the sites which sponsor the links. The actual fault lies with the sites which offered money in exchange for links. They should be penalized, not bloggers. So now, PR is biased with excellent blogs being given a low status. Before it was biased because of these excellent blogs trying to bring up not-so-good sponsors. It was biased then, it is biased now. But earlier, it was biased from the users side. Now its biased from the provider side (Google) which is a bigger bias than the former.

    Anyway, I don’t see any reason to stop using Google services. I find Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Calendar, Orkut and Google Search indispensable. I find Google Earth the best of all services around. I don’t think we should deny ourself a host of great facilities just because Google penalized us for a mistake we should understand. But I don’t think most of the bloggers will agree with me.

So what will happen shortly? I expect I-Hate-Google campaigns to spring up. Blogs, petitions, email campaigns… the works… I fully expect to see an anti-Google Firefox plugin coming up in a day or two Google will have a massive negative PR attack. Finally, there’ll be a small dip in Google profits for the quarter, and maybe their stock prices, but in a month or two, its business as usual for Google, while its not for all the bloggers.

So what next? If you’ve been hit, don’t waste your time sporting anti-Google campaigns. Try and utilize the time to try and firefight. Remove the links, or bargain with the advertisers to have No-Follow tags inserted. STOP all viral blog chains, like Technorati Faves and stuff. Put your efforts into blogging quality content. And have patience. Google can’t do this for ever. And where there’s a will, there’s a way. Monetizing blogs has come to stay. There’ll be a way soon… And we’ll keep you posted on it…. Ciao…. And fingers crossed hoping that BloggingIndia won’t feel the pinch…

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