[Update: Liz kindly pointed out that I dropped readers into the middle of the story without giving them a clue as to what I was talking about. Quick and dirty: Google lowered the page rank of bloggers who write paid posts or have paid links on their blogs to zero. Some of those folks had blogs that were ranked 5 or better. Advertisers don't like paying for zero-ranked blogs, and zeroes don't show in Google's results until around the fifth or sixth page of their search results. Not too many searchers go past page one. Some bloggers were banned from search results altogether. In effect, Google is saying that they aim to control advertising content and force conformation to their Adsense model.]

Just for the record, Google, about 60% of my visitors land here after a Google search.  You lowered my page rank by one, but all that means is that the people searching for info on scammers like Firstline and Automotive Warranty Advisors have to look a little harder for me.  Anyway, on with the introductions.

Meet Cass. Cass is a hard-working knitting lady with eight kids.  Yep, you counted right — EIGHT.  In her bio, she writes…

For the first time in 18 and a half years, I have my own little corner again. Somewhere along the way, I seem to have lost myself, and now that I realize I’m missing, I’m on the look out for me. You maybe don’t know what that means, but then again, maybe you do.

Cass has many blogs.  One of my favorites is Midlife Musings, where you get the real deal — a warm voice, a real person, a lot of laughs and the same kind of pissy passion you occasionally get from me here (See Virgin Mobile Sucks and they also Lie, Cheat and Steal).  Another one of my favorites is Cass Knits, where there’s always a nice photo of some new project or other interesting (and impossible, to me) knit item or yarn.  Yeah, Cass is a real threat to the blogosphere, that evil thing.  Just think about how those eight kids must suffer as a result of the few extra dollars she brought in through her fully disclosed paid posts. All of her blogs are ranked 0 now, but she has some wise words in spite of the bitchslap you delivered:

When I first saw what was happening last night, I did feel like puking. One of my blogs has 183 back links, and dropped from 3 to 0 like a stone. But just like I said a couple weeks ago when Google started the foreplay that led to this rough-em-up, my blog is more than a number. My value is more than my page rank. My visits are up, up, up.

Cass is someone you’d like to know.  She’s someone you’d introduce to your friends.  She’s a smart cookie, articulate and bright.  Cass is a blogger first and foremost.  Here’s more wisdom from her:

I did not allow PPP itself to tell me how to blog, when they tried. I am certainly not going to let Google dictate my editorial policy. They’ve only managed to give me pennies to the thousands of dollars I have made with various sponsored posts, and haven’t even paid out on that because I’ve yet to reach the magic $100. In 18 month of adsense use. Whatever. And just so you know…all these posts I am writing about PPP, Izea and SocialSpark lately? For free, because I could. Because they are doing important, industry changing things. And also, because the people who work there are FUN. And Clever. And Witty. And My Friends. Not write about my friends? No.

Yep, Cass is a blogger and a damn good one.  Good thing Google made an example out of her, because all it means is that she’ll keep writing great stuff and we’ll get to keep reading it.  Woo, Google.

Here’s Colleen.  Colleen is a 31-year old mom of three from Tampa, FL.  She also has several blogs, including Geeky Speaky where I can get a fix on new gadgets and other fun things.  But here’s the blog of hers that means the most to me:  3DayMom, where Colleen writes sponsored posts as well as posts about training for the 3-day Walk for Breast Cancer.  She committed to raising $2,200 for Breast Cancer Research.  I donated to her team, and she carried my grandmother’s name with her during the walk.  Yep Google, she’s another one you slapped around real good.  Did I mention that the money from paid blogging on 3DayMom was donated to the Susan G Komen foundation?  Yep, Colleen was a real threat, wasn’t she?

Over here is Cheryl, who blogs at  BasenjiMom.  Her mother is battling Pancreatic Cancer.  Here is a word picture of BasenjiMom’s current challenge, in her own words:

I fear that my Mother is losing her battle with Pancreatic Cancer. And I have had an internal struggle with myself for the past day or two as to whether I should even write this post….but, this is my outlet, and it may help someone else to read my words. I have to be strong, as I fear my older Sister is close to losing her grip, and Brother - well, let’s just say we could devote and entire blog to his issues and leave it at that - suffice to say I will need to be the leanee, and not the leaner.

Cheryl is another 3DayMom.  She raised $4,760.00 for Breast Cancer.  Bet you’re pretty proud of yourself now, Google.  Smacking around that woman must’ve really felt good, eh?

A few others you should meet:  Lucia, who only wrote ABOUT paid blogging but was never paid to blog.  There’s Lisa, who runs a review site.  I differ with Lisa, in that I think disclosure should be in the form of a badge or written disclosure at the top or bottom of the post, but her reviews are straightforward and straight up.  Bet you feel pretty righteous about catching Lisa, eh?   Here’s another:  Snoksred lives in NSW with her kitties and other half.  She’s a wonderful writer who you also slapped down to zero.  However, Snoksred, like these other ladies, refuses to let you bully her into submission.  Instead, she equates your smackdown to terrorism.

Many of these people are so terrified they have made the decision to negotiate with the terrorist - they are removing paid links then admitting they did things wrong and asking for “re-inclusion”. Any law enforcement official would tell you - never negotiate with a terrorist. You need to look for other ways to solve the problem. If Google is the main source of traffic to your blog, you need to spread your wings and find other options.

My Questions for Google:

While you were manually knocking down these bloggers, why didn’t you take care of issues like seeded malware links on page one of your results, or the content scrapers who routinely try to ride on my coattails with their .info domains that are nothing more than splogs intended to make money on my effort?  Why is your top search result for John Chow a link seller?  Isn’t that just a tiny bit hypocritical?  Why are your Google Alerts results full of splogs and spammers?  They’re a waste of time and bandwidth.

My Message to Google: You are venturing into dangerous territory, particularly in light of your “do no evil” slogan.  If you really intend to hand-pick and hand-rank blogs, clean your house first.  Get rid of the malware vendors, spammers and sploggers that frequent your top results.  Lose the scrapers and the scammers.  If you can’t do that, then abolish PageRank altogether as a metric, because selectively bitchslapping bloggers is an ineffective way to run a business.  I know your PR (and by PR, I mean Public Relations) department isn’t awfully competent and that you don’t really care about that, but here’s the bottom line:  You have opened a door for Yahoo! to waltz right through, and you underestimate the women and students out there who want to make some extra money if you think they won’t turn around and accept the Yahoo! invitation to be evaluated on the basis of their content and not their links.

If you want to make advertising the center of your revenue model, do it with some sense.  Instead of punishing bloggers who are paid, find a way to incorporate them into the model.

Will you penalize Techcrunch for their “thank the sponsor” linky love, or Amazon’s purchase of space on Robert Scoble’s blog, where the ‘chosen few’ [edit]affiliates[/edit] get a $40 check for each Kindle sold via their blog?  Scoble disclosed that in his second blog post about the Kindle, a device I think is utterly useless, by the way, and incredibly overpriced.   I have no problem with him being paid until I consider the outrage of Arrington & Co and the constant efforts to humiliate bloggers who also are paid to write posts [edit]make money from posting[/edit] about products. Then the hypocrisy shines.  (No Robert, I am not calling YOU a hypocrite; I AM calling Google hypocritical, though).  You can be selective or you can be fair, but you can’t be both.  Selective is evil.  You do no evil.  Right?

Disclosure:  I wrote paid blog posts in the past.  I do not write them now.  My choice not to write them has nothing to do with Google or the advertisers that paid me.  Other constraints, including a lack of time, are the reason.  Nothing more, nothing less.  As long as there is disclosure, paid bloggers are doing no evil and you are.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: google, page rank, blogging, blogs, paid blogging, payperpost, robert scoble, michael arrington, techcrunch, kindle, malware, splogs, spam

I think this video is an awesome example of a collaborative community effort, with a maps mashup just for good measure.

One PDF of the GMail envelope, zillions of people sending in 10-second submissions of the envelope moving from left to right on the screen, an editor and a map. What a terrific idea. I’ll bet there are other cool ways something like this could be done…got ideas?

Technorati Tags: GMail, video, Google, mashup, collaboration, community

18,999 items in 30 days. I suppose I should have read one more to make it an even 19,000. I share them, too…they’re on the left sidebar.

Matt Cutts says paid links should be disclosed, and bloggers should be turning in bloggers who don’t. There’s more on Techmeme, including Calancanis’ usual bombastic assumption that PayPerPost is goin’ down in flames. (Nonsense, Jason).

Here’s my question for Google: How can you announce this program for paid, embedded text links this way:

Ad formats: You can create text ads, image ads, or our new text link ad format in your pay-per-action campaign. Text link ads are brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher’s page. These Javascript-based ads will display like regular hyperlinks and allow publishers to embed these links inline with other text to promote your product or service.

I added the bold text. When Google made this announcement I questioned why Calacanis wasn’t all over it the same way he was PayPerPost, since this is even worse. Embedding paid links that don’t even relate to what I’m writing about? Imagine this sentence:

(Don’t click the links; they’re just placeholders). But for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that link one led off to “FormulaOneFanSite.com”. Let’s pretend that link two went to “HardDriveRestoration.com”, and link three went to “NoVax4Us.com”.

Obviously the only relevant link would be the first — but under the description Google gave for their program, links two and three could be in the text despite the fact that they are not relevant.

Now, isn’t that ‘covert marketing’?

C’mon, Google, what’s the deal here?

Technorati Tags: text link ads, advertising, Jason Calacanis, covert marketing

I picked this up from Robert Scoble’s shared items in Google Reader.

A good source tells me that Google will soon announce the selling of a premium version of their Google Apps service for $50 per year and user. Named Google Apps Premier Edition, this package will include 10 gigabytes of email storage. The service will have a 24 hour tech support as well as a promised uptime of 99.9%. Blackberrys will be able to have mobile access to emails. The package will also include Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets program, that is, word processing and Google’s Excel clone.

I’ve been using GMail for about 18 months and can’t imagine life without it. I also use Google Calendar (though I also like and use 30Boxes), and have twiddled with the Docs and Spreadsheets apps, though I haven’t really considered them serious replacements for MS Word or Excel at this point. But 10 GB of mail storage, BlackBerry push, and linkage with a specific domain is a pretty powerful package. This could be very interesting at $50/user per year.

Oh — I share my Google Reader items, too — you can subscribe to it here. I really like Google reader — it has just about every feature I can imagine wanting, it’s fast, and versatile. Now that they’re reporting RSS subscribers on the blog, it’s just about perfect.

Update: It looks like it’s live.

Technorati Tags: in-the-news, google, web, web-20

The latest and greatest blogosphere flurry is over the audacity of Google daring to toot their own horn by offering ‘tips’ at the top of searches for terms like ‘calendar’ and ‘blogs’.

It’s interesting to me that no one really questions the right of a business to promote its own products on its own pages. Instead, the argument seems to be around the Google motto to “do no evil”, suggesting that any form of self-promotion can be viewed as either evil or an erosion of trust.

Mike Arrington views the ‘tips’ move as arrogance, and goes on to say:

Google needs to change. They can’t kill the motto, so they need to live up to it, permanently. They need to stop treating the outside world with disdain, and replace it with transparency and honesty. Users must always come first. Always. And they need to do it soon.

Arrington’s mandate is far more arrogant than Google’s tips. They haven’t done anything wrong! The screenshot at the beginning of this post shows a clear differentiation between search results and “tips”. The search results haven’t changed, but there is a little Google ad at the top. B.F.D.

Matthew Ingram is more reasonable, pointing out that:

Google is being held to a much higher standard than another company likely would be, in part because it is so large now, and also because of its famous “Don’t be evil” motto — which is clearly causing way more trouble than it’s worth.

Perhaps it’s worth stopping for a few minutes and defining evil. Evil is not placing a small promo for one’s own products at the top of a search page. If that were true, we’d have to call Arrington evil, since he has ads for Edgio at the top of Techcrunch. Of course he’s not evil, and neither is Google.

Google provides free mail, calendar, spreadsheet, video, word processing, blogging and picture tools. They are entitled to promote those products and anyone searching with their engine should expect it. What tradeoff would be more appropriate for providing free server space, bandwidth and tools?

It’s their right to self-promote. Leave ‘em alone.

Update: Matt Cutts gives a stronger insight into the Google culture and says that if Google had more bloggers perceptions would change. Perhaps, but I think it’s really more of a situation where Google is the big target that’s hard to miss. Taking aim and hitting Google is easy but not necessarily valid — being objective and realistic seems to be a harder task.

Technorati Tags: search, Google tips

It looks like a bunch of people had all of their email deleted from their GMail accounts after hackers took advantage of a Firefox exploit.

The comments on Techcrunch are interesting: The dilemma is, of course, that if Google were to keep backups of our deleted email they leave us vulnerable to subpoenas and by not keeping backups, we’re vulnerable to data loss. My solution is here. If this doesn’t work for you and you’re a GMail or other webmail user, figure out a way to back up the mail that matters to you, because I don’t see Google changing their backup policies anytime soon.

Technorati Tags: GMail, Firefox, Email, backup

Ordinarily I’d shrug and pass this one by, but after reading Jason Calacanis’ gloat about a remark Google’s Matt Cutts wrote about devaluing PayPerPost blogs’ page ranks, this is too good to pass by.

I doubt that Google The Corporation gave an Official Blessing to this obvious knockoff of Yahoo!s IE 7 toolbar upgrade page. Jeremy Zawodny over at Yahoo attributes it to laziness, stupidity or a mix of both.

Before Google starts threatening to drop page rank, they’d better clean up their own ranks.

Update: Matt Cutts responds with examples of extreme similarities between Google’s text ad design and Yahoo’s. Maybe they should all just merge.

Technorati Tags: google, yahoo, Jason Calacanis, SEO