The informal corporate motto for Google is "Don't Be Evil." There's been some buzz in the world of blogging for the past couple of weeks that would suggest otherwise. Being the inquisitive sort of person I am, I decided to see how far the rabbit hole goes.

It appears to have started back on September 25th when David Airey announced in his article, Google search rank drop: advice needed, that he had removed all advertising from his blog after being penalized by Google. Apparently he then sent an email to the people who had linked to his contest. At least that's what Sucker said.

A couple of days later, Courtney Tuttle noticed that John Chow's PageRank dropped from 6 to 5. The following week, Josh Spaulding noticed that Andy Beard's PageRank dropped from 5 to 4.

On October 6th, Andy Beard reacted to being defamed by Google, suggesting that blogs are being penalized for mentioning PageRank within their advertising. On October 8th, he confirmed being penalized after getting the official word.

The reactions of other bloggers have been a little different. Paula Neal Mooney was thankful that her PageRank dropped to 4 and not all the way to 0, while Chris Lodge doesn't feel like blogging due to the negative charge that's in the air. Shane Ede seemed a bit angry, comparing Google to a dictatorship or schoolyard bully. Some bloggers, especially those with a PageRank of 0, seemed indifferent to the events that are unfolding.

My own blog has been holding at a steady PageRank of 4 for months. I just checked to see if I lost any PageRank yet at any of the datacenters and I haven't. Perhaps my blog hasn't been deemed important enough yet.

What does all this boil down to? First and foremost, Google is a search engine. It's their service and it's their rules. If we don't abide by them, Google can do whatever it wants with our PageRanks. That's the bottom line and there's nothing you or I can do about it. What rules are we supposed to follow? Straight from the horse's mouth, it's all about the paid links:

  • Add rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> tag , or
  • Redirect the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

I'm sorry, but that kind of defeats the purpose for paid links in the first place. Those of us who write sponsored posts for PayPerPost (PPP) won't have to worry about the paid links pretty soon. Sometime in November, PPP will be releasing Argus. They'll be using the included tools to provide advertisers with accurate page views and visitor information rather than having to rely on Google's PageRanks or the Alexa ranks. Look for other sponsored post services to either follow suit or use PPP's Argus for their own requirements.

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On another note, it's apparent that some bloggers use PageRank as a basis for linking to other blogs, whether the other blogs are relevant to their own or not. Wendy Piersall asked whether PageRank fosters stinginess and was answered with an alternative view. PageRank should never be a consideration. Relevance should be the only consideration.

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