Friday I learned that a local business here in Nevada was ready to cut me a small check to host a link to their new website on one of my blogs. The business is a web design firm here in Northern Nevada. The owner is a friend of mine and he’s now ready to do some advertising.

Unfortunately, thanks to Matt Cutts, it has come to my attention that Google appears to be positioning itself to penalize sites/blogs who sell text links.

This doesn’t hurt me too much, and the reason it won’t hurt me is a bit ironic. I already sell text links to Google. Yeah, that’s right, Google sends me a monthly check for displaying the text link ads you see to the left of this post when looking at the single post page. Google also pays me to display the image banner at the top of the main page of my site.

Why then, can I not sell the text link to my good buddy in web design? It is, afterall, just advertising right?

Google and this “all your base are belong to us” attitude is getting out of hand. The company has gone beyond provided information via a search engine, and is now dictating what we as internet users and webmasters do on our own terms.

I understand that a LOT of people sell hundreds and hundreds of links. But who’s fault is that? Care to take a guess? Google.

You see, Google came up with the arbitrary site ranking system that was heavily based on how many back links a page has. The amount of weight that goes into those back links is now in question, but no one can dispute it has in the past played a major role in the search engine’s ALGO.

Not only that, Google also came up with a weapon that served no purpose other than shooting themselves in the foot. That weapon is known as PageRank. PageRank is Google’s way of ranking a page based on the amount of back links that come in.

But now all of a sudden those of us who play fair are at fault for Google’s own short comings. How is that right?

It gets better (or worse depending on how you look at it). Google actually wants you and I to “report” sites that sell links. If that won’t open up a world of internet warfare I don’t know what will.

I guess I should just login to my account over at BlogAds and start finding all of my competitors right? I can go report them and hope that they get put on some kind of black list right?

See how bad this could be?

I know it can be said that Google is doing this for the better of the internet, but if you think about it, Google is the only winner here. Why do I have Google ads on my site? Because I don’t have time to find text link advertisers. But imagine what would happen if EVERYONE was barred from sell advertising. Everyone wanting to make money would have to go to Google Adsense or a similar supplier.

It basically says to me “no one can sell links but us”, which is completely disingenuous.

It sickens me to hear an employee of Google talk this way. I really hope that Matt just stuck his foot in his mouth and will soon pull it out. If Google is serious about this, I may have to start actually using my Overture account.

So much for that check… Matt Cutts killed my plan.

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