It seems it is just one thing after another with Google. First off a while ago Google slapped people’s pageranks who were using Text Link Ads on their websites. A lot of sites got huge penalties some even going from pagerank 9 to 4! The thing about pagerank is people will pay for that. It is how a lot of advertisers look at your site and how it is gauged. Just this past week Google once again slapped people who use another service rather than adsense, this time it was PayPerPost. It seems they are dropping the pageranks for these sites down to 0!

Then just recently Google has changed their Adsense ads as well. Before the entire ad and surrounding area was clickable, now only the title and URL are! You can see what I mean from the picture below. So if you are an Adsense publisher it is likely that your CTR and overall income will go down. This is killer for people who are dependent on Adsense.

So how do I feel about this? Well I was slapped by Google! ThinkComputers pagerank went from a 5 to a 3 and this blog’s pagerank went from a 4 to a 0! For the longest time I thought Google was the good guy, but now since more of their business is online advertising rather than search it seems like they are becoming that bad guy. They have about 60% market share in search and I guess they think if you are not using their advertising solutions and are using someone else’s they should penalize you! It seems like foul play to me.

Even people who have done link trains and contests on their blogs are being hit, even de-index by Google! So what to do? Should I drop Text Link Ads? I don’t see Google giving me that extra income each month! And if I replaced TLA with one of Google’s stupid link units it would not make anywhere near as much as what TLA makes me. But a lot of bloggers are dropping these services. I’m sure that pisses off TLA and PayPerPost. It seems like Google is forcing people to use their service instead of these alternative services by doing things like lowering pageranks to stop people from using these other services.

Anyone could say stop using Google for search. Even if a lot of people do that they will probably still uphold their market share and c’mon we all know they do have the best search out there. I think their actions will make their pagerank system obsolete and people will really start looking at what they are doing and see the foul play. As you can see from their stock it fell when they implemented the new ads.

I think what I’m going to do is become less dependent on all Google services. I’ve already dropped the main Google ad on this site and I want to drop Google on ThinkComputers. Also I’m not that worried about rankings for ThinkComputers as most of our traffic comes from affiliate sites. If you are pissed at Google you might want to try to use other sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to get traffic. In closing all I have to say is bad play Google…