Back on November 4th, I told Google to kiss my ass. I admit it; I was angry, but not angry enough to go to some of the extremes that other people did. There were bloggers who abandoned anything Google and there were bloggers that put the "rel=nofollow" on all of their outbound links, not just the paid links.
It took me two days to go through my blog reading list, since I no longer use a feedreader. It wasn't just the number of blogs that took so long. My lousy DSL connection didn't help at all. I really hope to resolve that next month, if Globe Broadband has their capacity problems fixed by then. Anyway, I told myself I wouldn't be posting anything new, on either of my blogs, until I got through that list.
At the end of my list is BloggingZoom. While it's not a blog, it's just as important. Blog articles are posted there for blogs that I've never heard of before. It was there that I found two interesting articles.
The first one, by Vic at Blogger Unleashed, tells us how a lot of bloggers are self-centered and started me thinking about how I've been doing things. I admit that I haven't played by all the rules, but to be honest, I didn't know what the rules were before I jumped in head first with some of my tactics.
Let's take the sponsored posts services, for example. I didn't know that the links in sponsored posts, without the nofollow attribute, were considered wrong in the eyes of Google. I had never read the Google terms of service, except for the terms that applied to Google AdSense. Unless someone was planning on gaming the system, why would they? It's just a search engine, right? I read everything thoroughly after getting my PageRank dropped from 4 to 3 and then to 0.
The second article, by Court at Court's Internet Marketing School, explains what links should have the nofollow attributes attached and which shouldn't. There were even more gems in the comments that followed. One thing Google doesn't do very well is to communicate to us at our level. I can only blame their public relations department for that.
I've made some changes recently and I'm going to make more. I put Google AdSense back up on this blog, but people who visit 2 times a week or more will never see them, nor will people who are registered and logged in. December 12th was the last sponsored post I wrote and I won't be doing any more until SocialSpark comes online. Why? SocialSpark is supposed to comply with Google's terms of service. On January 12th, I'll be putting the nofollow attributes on all the old sponsored posts and moving them out of the sponsored post category. Immediately after that, I'll be requesting reconsideration using the Google Webmaster tools.
The bottom line is that everything that happened to me is my fault and I really can't place the blame on anyone or anything else.
