By now, there have been many blog reports on sites having their Google PageRank updated. While some have expressed shock and dismay with certain prominent sites having their PRs penalised (such as Andy Beard’s) for what most attributed to having paid links or reviews, it should not come as a surprise, what with the concerned whispers about Google clamping down on paid links rippling through the blogosphere for months now.

But after reading Matt’s questions on the possibility of facing similar penalties for yourself and Rob Watts’ passionate and very valid demands from Google for transparency of process and fairness, what had me concerned was - what’s left for new or small-time bloggers like us who want a piece of the action, but are willing to do it without compromising our conscience?

Now, I am certainly no authority, guru or expert in this area. In fact, by posting this, I am half living in fear of reprisal and ridicule. But I try daily to do things straight, and with such developments, sometimes it makes me question if my actions and beliefs are even relevant anymore in this current time and world.

In the probable penalising of having paid links, it has made out that the simple act of selling ad space is evil and compromises on quality, pure and simple. But are things always so black and white? No doubt there are plenty of sites who live by the principle that everything has a price and if a left-field site wished to pay wads of cash for a link to their PR7 virtual estate, they would be first in queue. But with the growing blanket punishment dished out, Google has discounted the fact that site owners still have the autonomy to decide on the quality of links they allow and that not all links are bad. The punishment dismisses the existence of site owners who do exercise this autonomy in ensuring that they only sell their link space to relevant and related content. (For example, when I signed up with TLA, I had 2 offers - one was for a charity awareness site that you see right now, the other was for some religious propaganda site which I turned down despite the earning potential.) Sure, who doesn’t want more money? But I wouldn’t sell a text link to some site which I didn’t care for or had content that ran against my principles.

Ironically this comes after my review of TNX.net, a marketplace for buying backlinks and selling link space on your site. However, the same filtering feature is available and I chose to exercise restrain by restricting the kind of sites on which I wanted my links to appear, in my test campaign.

Of course, with the gazillions of sites that they would then have to review at such micro levels would present a huge resource and logistic issue to Google. So it could be easier to just slap a penalty with eyes closed and then wait for pleas for reinclusion. Yet at the same time you see Google ads showing paid link services - but you cannot fault them - money talks. And as long as it only talks for them, surely it justifies promotion of the same services they seem so adamant to eradicate. Afterall, the ads seem to provide relevant content from search or content requests, don’t they?

Paid reviews might have contributed to Andy Beard’s penalty, but are all paid reviews born bad? Of course, you could argue that no advertiser would pay for a review that burnt them to the ground - but that is not to say there aren’t those who do not mind balanced reviews that could contribute to their efforts in improving their sites. And again, reviewers have the ability to choose what reviews to take, and the honest ones would always work on reviews that serve not only to bring awareness to their readers with balanced critique, but also in a way provide consultancy to the reviewees. Would the end result necessarily be poor content? Again, being honest and ethical doesn’t seem to bring its reward.

The penalties do not reinforce Google’s public mission of their desire to surface the best quality content and not litter the Internet with monetisation methods that pollute the knowledge goldmine, but that it only serves to paint an image of a growing monopoly who have lost control of an exercise created to unconsciously brand themselves as the ultimate authority and Internet police. It pretty much leaves the small voices like us in the dust too, what with advertisers still putting PR on a pedestal. Honesty and ethics won’t put food on the table - that extra $15 for the link to the religious site will. Afterall, trying to make a living the honest way might still get me penalised.

Then again, my blog is so new and has a PR0, so why should I worry?

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