Dear Google
Your recent decision to invoke a manual penalty on the download page for Google Chrome will have lasting ramifications for the whole of online marketing, whether display advertising, affiliate marketing, and other performance marketing such as CPA models, making many such business models unworkable.
Read more on Open Video To Google – Please Reinstate Chrome…
Then the way Google worded this might be of interest.
Read more on If You Happened To Want To Sell Links…
I know that is a shocking and controversial headline, but there are a number of serious points to be made.
Firstly I like linking to people who link to me, whether on the post they first wrote, or on the syndicated copy that now appears on SEOmoz, even when the name referenced is “Andy Beal”.
Google is going to have a hard time deciding which is duplicate content, and will probably pick the SEOmoz article because it is the domain with the most authority.
If you syndicate articles or blog posts, make sure they link back to the original version, whichever you consider original. I am not going to help Google, as I have linked to both.
I probably know as much about smartphones as Matt Cutts does about… poodles (he is a cat lover)
I have a SIMM card with a 7 mbps connection, but purely as a backup or for when I am travelling around Poland and am somewhere I can’t get good wifi. The SIMM works in one of my wife’s cast off mobile phones in an emergency.
As detailed in the linked posts, Google gave away lots of Android mobile phones to developers. That is something I am very familiar with – I used to work in the games industry and among other things handled relationships with all the PC Manufacturers. AMD, Intel, Creative Labs, Nvidia, Matrox, etc etc.
Even though NDAs have now expired (I think the longest was Intel’s at 5 years) I am not going to go into specific details but here are the challenges.
In those days we were working with multiple standards, processors had lots of proprietary 3D functions, graphics cards not only had different features, but also different graphics libraries to access them, 3DFX, OpenGL and DirectX, and even sound cards had different features and sound libraries.
Some might look on it as a lot of back scratching, but it was a symbiotic relationship – it probably still is.
Developers had early access to hardware, sometimes months, even a whole year in advance. Different terms were subject to negotiation, status etc.
In exchange there were lots of cross-marketing possibilities, certainly linking happened, but also branding on boxes, adverts, possible lucrative OEM deals etc.
Whilst this might seem to favor the larger development studios, and it did in some ways, ultimately small development studios, if they got on board could certainly gain a “leg up” from the hardware guys, and this is something I was very active to encourage.
Thus Google giving away a few hundred, even a few 1000 mobile phones is barely a grain of sand compared to what is given out behind the scenes.
From what I can see, there were tons of press representitives at Google I/O, they received tons of coverage from notable tech blogs.
Press have always received free samples of hardware, or at least most have, though many publications have rules about keeping the “gear”, auction it off for charity, give it away as prizes etc.
In doing so that can help them remain impartial because they are not keeping the item.
The paid links saga of 2007 didn’t really clear anything up and effectively swept issues under the table, with the untouchables remaining untouchable. Michael Gray is forced to nofollow advertiser links.
Payola or Blogola, whatever you wish to call it still exists, and is practiced by Google.
When Matt Cutts defends Google’s actions because Google doesn’t need links, that isn’t quite the whole truth.
It is quite true that Google doesn’t need to rank for “search engine” in Google
Here in Poland, a search for “Android” which used to be a very generic term, the first 4 results point to sites about Google’s Android operating system.
But Google doesn’t rank for Mobile Phone, and even their partner, HTC who made both the G1 and G2 handsets only rank 3rd for smartphone, using US Geolocation and personalized search off (not that I search for this topic… ever), with Blackberry in 2nd.
Actually that was yesterday, looks like HTC now rank 2nd, and Blackberry has been pushed down the results.
Here are the current results for various terms:-
Google does not penalize for paid or sponsored reviews but can penalize for paid or sponsored links that pass PageRank – Brian Solis & Techcrunch are blatantly wrong.
As Techcrunch now has 2 million readers, many of them corporate, you would think they would be a little more careful publishing statements that are false, misleading or could seriously damage not just a single company, but a whole growing business sector, even if they clearly hate it. Opinion is one thing – stating facts that are wrong is in a totally different territory Here is an excerpt for the recent fluff piece for Brian Solis on Techcrunch
Seems simple enough, except two things are going to prevent this from effectively promoting the sponsoring brand over time — 1) disclosures read like warning signs; 2) Google is downgrading any blog or site that actively publishes paid content.
Sarah Lacey’s recent piece was fluff as well
Google has no stated problem with paid or sponsored reviews – with Google it has always been about machine readable disclosure of paid links i.e. use some way to block the links from counting such as rel=”nofollow”, javascript, block with redirect + robots.txt etc
I stated that Brian’s article was a fluff piece, because it is very easy to research, but here are a few choice articles.
Lets preface this by I am not a lawyer, and I am aware that that is a very long headline and title.
Judith at SEO Chicks was looking at the new UK Unfair Trading Regulations
Here is a link to the official guidance (PDF).
What follows are my own notes whilst reading through the document, which I thought some readers might find useful, though you should read it in full if you trade from the UK (maybe 400+ subscribers)
(7) Falsely stating that a product will only be available for a very limited
time, or that it will
The restoration of my green pixel's didn't last long (just 1 week), and probably wasn't a full restoration anyway.
I had this feeling that PR5 was "Google Probation" as my link growth has been continuing and my Google Directory listing suggested PR6.
All paid reviews on this blog are blocked with robots.txt and I declare that is the case in my disclosure policy.
Thus we need to look at other potential problems (note these are potential problems, but nothing I can really change)
Some regular readers decided to purchase advertising – advertising links unlike many blogs are nofollow. I mentioned
I honestly want to believe that you are a good internet citizen, and your attacks on search engine optimization and now affiliate marketers are honest, and without any form of prejudice.
So while you are attacking affiliate marketing, please ensure you have first of all cleared up all the problems in the paid links debate, such as what seems to be a company, where you are on the board of directors, buying links.
It is widely discussed that buying links in Wordpress themes is something that might be a signal of web spam, and the same should be true for buying links
Now Google have changed their wording for reconsideration requests (formerly reinclusion requests), I have filed one for this domain.
I am not going to call this a perfect example of a reconsideration request, but I decided that it was better to be 100% honest about my thought process for both now and in the future, because whilst I am now blocking paid reviews with robots.txt, there are so many things still not specified within the webmaster guidelines that it is a potential minefield, especially for someone who has previously been the target of a manual penalty.
Here is exactly what I sent to the Google webmaster team.
With all the previous discussion of paid reviews and my unwillingness to raise the white flag or bend over, this post is going to come as a bit of a shock.
I am lowering the red flag
Carry on reading to find out why this isn’t the same as raising a white flag, and is far from surrendering to Google on paid reviews.
Wide Circles = Blog Comment Spam
Maybe I am a little sensitive to blog comment spam issues, but I like genuine members of my community gaining a little link juice for their comments. Many comments you find on my blog are better than full blog posts elsewhere (sometimes the comments are better than what I write)
The best way to guest post on my blog is just to write a great comment.