Google Makes The Rules And You Better "NoFollow"

If you own a site or blog with a high page rank and you have links or paid advertisements going to another site, be careful. You might wake up one day and Google will no longer include your site in their index.

Here's the very abridged version of it so pay attention. By no means is this information new, but for quite some time now Google has been cracking down on links (especially paid links) that don't follow their rules. You can have paid links, sponsors or advertisers on your site but you need to have the, Google mandated, "rel=nofollow" tag in the link. The Reason? This prevents the passage of page rank to the receiving site.

Why does the big G pitch such a fit about this? Simple, they want to try and keep the searches as pure as possible(remember this statemement for later). Google is even encouraging people to turn in offending paid links. The coveted Pagerank is calculated by a number of factors, including the amount of incoming links. Google's problem is not with making money by selling links on your site, their problem is with people gaming the algorithm and selling non-relevant links on a big PR site.

To over simplify it, if you have a high ranking website in Google's index and you sell links on your site, you will pass along a certain amount of your page rank to the recipient's site even if it is not relevant to your site. This is the primary reason for the "NoFollow" tag. It tells the search engines NOT to follow that link and will require physical clicks for the link to get visited.

There have been many people that have been beat down by Google for not following the rules. The infamous John Chow is a prime example. Even if you search for his name, "John Chow" he doesn't come up in the top 50 results.

There is much more information out on the net that will answer the questions you may have. This brings a whole new dimension to paid link advertising. Even though it shouldn't, this forces site owners to rethink the relevance of links. After all, if you have gaming site, you want to send people to gaming related sites and not pharmaceuticals, right? If you have a website or a blog, you should want people to go to a site that would interest them. Google thinks this type of linking is better for the Internet as a whole. Proper or "white hat" SEO is a longer process but in the end will achieve better results. Keep on Google's good side, provide relevant useful links. You'll be much better off.

But wait - What about keeping the results pure from above? I have a question. Is banning someone from the SERPs because you violated their policy really a pure thing to do? If someone searching for John Chow and can't find John Chow, is that a pure result? John Chow has 100's of thousands of visitors to his site per month, and he writes about making money online and do you think that you can find him for those keywords? Nope. So if you mess with Google who currently has about 63% of the searches in the US, you can get kicked from their pure listings. Someone once said that if you "do a Google on Google" you don't get any of disparaging comments. Kind of reminds me of moderating comments on a blog. :) This leads me to the question; How much power can one entity have?

The other side of the coin is that Google is a business. A very large and profitable business. If you want to play in their yard, you should have to follow their rules, right? I read somewhere that some people think Google is just some free software that comes with the computer. I don't know what side I am on yet. The "anti-Google, ALT Search engine" crowd or the "let them do what they want" group.

All that being said, I think that it may get worse before it gets better. As shown historically, Absolute power, corrupts absolutely. Your thoughts?