Off The Cuff

Google Has Spanked Us! What Now?

Posted by: From Arkansas in Are You Kidding Me?, Blogging, Odds And Ends on Dec 08 2007

The huge search engine, Google, has gone and done it big time. For months, we heard the rumors that Google was going to be Big Brother watching us. Shore nuff, dey has gone and done it. For those who are new to blogging or have lived in a cave for the last several months, Google decided to drop the page rank of any blog that had paid advertisements (except their own, of course) on them. Those of us who do such posting from time to time believe that it is our right to have what we desire on our blogs. Google does not pay the webhosting fees so they should have no say in how we run our blogs.

Some people believe that they have the right to do what they do. I agree. They do, more or less. However, the shareholders of the corporation might not agree if enough people see the big g as a threat to their living.

It was recently posted that in October or November, Google was going to downgrade their page ranks on any and all blogs that had paid posts on their blogs. I was among those who was “spanked” by the big G (G for got a lot of guts to do that). According to what I have read, if I do not “clean” my blog of all paid posts and send an apology to the big Googoo for my treacherous behavior, I will be delisted in January.

The problem here is that the places that I work for (at least a couple of them) are doing the exact opposite meaning that you have to choose whether to go with the big Googoo or with them. If you choose Googoo, you get to keep your wonderful page rank. However, if you choose the company that you work for, you really have a problem because then, when the blog gets delisted, the company you work for will drop you like a hot potato because you no longer have standing in the blogging world….according to some people who speculate on these things. Trouble is, they were pretty much right about the googoo spanking.

So, what do you do about this? If you decide to side with googoo (many have), then you simply go hat in hand and apologize for doing your job and making money that didn’t come via googoo. If you decide to side with the company, be ready to be unemployed by all but a very few companies. What does all this mean? We are (sorry), we are between a rock and a hard place because the big guys (meaning googoo and the companies that pay the wages) are trying to take over the net and we who blog are the pawns in the game.

What can you do to fight back? Glad you asked. My husband wrote a great article or two on just such a subject. You can read it here. If you would like to have a slash Google picture, you can get one here. Isn’t it great to be able to have a voice about all this? Yes!!! My voice says this to Google:

SHAME ON YOU FOR TREATING THE LITTLE GUY THIS WAY. If you want to spank something, try the companies that are doing this, not us you BIG BULLY!!!